Alright, just for fun I’m kicking off a new blog series. I’m going to publish a new “Deploy a Framework Friday” each week for about the next, well, bunch of weeks. There are a TON of frameworks that are available on PaaS Technologies.
This first entry I’m going to implement a simple Sinatra app with Ruby. Nothing fancy, simply a hello world and the respective deployment to a Cloud Foundry PaaS.
First, let’s whip out the super complex code (right, this isn’t complex, I just like sarcasm). The hello.rb file I created.
[sourcecode language=”ruby”]
require ‘sinatra’
get ‘/’ do
"Hello World!"
end
get ‘/route’ do
"Hello from a route URI!"
end
[/sourcecode]
Next add a Gemfile & respective Gemfile.lock as such.
That does it. Yeah, not a whole lot to get started working on a Sinatra Project. For more information on Sinatra check out the main web presence here http://www.sinatrarb.com/.
Thanks to Larry Carvalho and Krishnan Subramanian for lining me up to speak at the kick off bootcamp keynote and for a PaaS Session at the Cloud Expo Boot Camp. I had a great time and was able to cover some great material with the audience. It was great to hear a number of companies and people diving into PaaS Technology and learning about what this technology can do.
The audience, above all was very open to the idea of openness with technologies that are open. See the theme there? 😉 There were a few resounding themes to things people would like to see added to the Open Source PaaS Solutions such as Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry and Open Shift. Here are a couple of these;
People want to have continuous deployment or continuous integration features added to the PaaS Capabilities so that the PaaS doesn’t just deploy code blindly. The two companies that came up that have some capabilities around continuous deployment and integration are AppHarbor and CloudBees. But the stronger ask from the audience was for there to be some type of integration with one of the open offerings like Cloud Foundry or Open Shift. Some discussion also followed around these capabilities being a default “service” within a PaaS or even IaaS offering.
The other thing that brought up a lot of questions was the architecture behind the various PaaS Solutions. I walked the audience through a description based on what I wrote up in “Cloud Foundry Architecture – Removing the Operating System Barriers with PaaS Part 4“. It generally tends to fit similar architectures in the PaaS realm and most of the audience liked the idea of how PaaS operations are working.
If you attended either of my talks and want to check out the PaaS Providers that came up during questions and discussions, here’s the one’s I can remember:
Tier 3 – Enterprise grade IaaS and PaaS w/ the Web Fabric Product. This company I currently work for, they’re doing a rock solid job with the offering.
AppFog – Very application focused and IaaS autonomous, i.e. you can pick AWS, HP Cloud, or Azure with more options to come in the future. I’ve worked with these guys also and they too kick ass!
AppHarbor – .NET focused PaaS running atop AWS, provides a free tier and continuous integration and rollback features. I haven’t worked for these guys, but I’ve met everyone on the team and they’re all top notch. Props guys! 🙂
CloudBees – Java focused PaaS with Enterprise focused CI/CD capabilities with Jenkins.
Heroku – These are the guys who kicked off the whole PaaS thing a few years ago. They started Ruby on Rails focused but also cover Java and Node.js too.
EngineYard – A solid PaaS offering running primarily atop AWS with some IaaS style features available too.
Windows Azure – Microsoft’s cloud offering, with a lot of updates around Node.js lately. They’ve traditionally focused on .NET, but lately have put as much or more focus on Node.js. Looks like things are improving in the Azure Camp.
More to come tomorrow with DeployCon at the Cloud Expo. Until then, cheers.
A couple months ago I shifted gears and started working for Tier 3 on a number of projects. I made this decision for a few reasons:
1. I’m a huge advocate of PaaS (Platform as a Service) technologies. I like what PaaS enables and what it eliminates. Matter of fact I’d say I’m a bull on the technology. I like to learn about, create and build the architectures within platforms. I also love the rather complex back end problems that come up when building a truly powerful, scalable, high end, highly available PaaS. You say, “Adron, Tier 3 doesn’t have any PaaS stuff, it’s an IaaS Provider, this doesn’t explain anything?” Aha! Read on (unless of course you’ve caught the news today… then you already know the answer)
2. I’m a polyglot dev. .NET kind of burned me out a few years back and I dedicated to learning as many other frameworks, languages, and tech stacks that I could. I’ve never been happier with the variety these days. I’ll admit though I still love to use all those years of experience I have with .NET. Indeed, I have a little soft spot in my heart for C#. Tier 3, along with the Iron Foundry Project, has given me the opportunity to work across languages and stacks including Node.js, Ruby, Objective-C and more.
3. I like to build things, advocate for those things and what they can do for you, for dev teams, and in the end what we developers can build with them. Sometimes this might mean I do it myself, sometimes it means coordinating and leading a team (or as I often say of leads, “serving” the team). Right now I’m getting to do a little bit of both and it is indeed fun and really exciting! This brings me to the answer.
The Answer:Tier 3 now has one of the, if not the most advanced PaaS Environment available today. Yeah, you can quote me on that. I’m not saying it because I work at Tier 3, I’m saying it because I decided to come work at Tier 3 to help build it. Those of you that know me, know why and where I do things. I have intent behind these decisions. 😉
The Tier 3 PaaS environment officially has more support for frameworks than any other PaaS Provider out there today. Congratulations to the team for getting this out the door! Needless to say, I’m proud to be a part of this team of bad ass devs! Cheers!
What is the Tier 3 Web Fabric?
Here’s a short tour I put together…
What exactly makes up a Web Fabric? We’ve taken Coud Foundry as a core, adding Iron Foundry for full support of all major Enterprise Frameworks and added a fabric over these services to provide an automated seem-less creation of a complete PaaS Environment.
How would you use a PaaS like this?
In an enterprise software and application development shop there is often a break out between development, testing, maybe a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and finally production. One way to utilize such capabilities is to built a Web Fabric for each of these environments. Once each environment is built, these can then be scaled up or down as needed. Once the environment is done simply delete it. For an environment like UAT or Test, this is one of the most ideal situations to create an environment from scratch, ensuring that outliers don’t affect the testing criteria. How do you build a Tier 3 Web Fabric PaaS? This is the fun part. This process involves a little information and a few clicks, which then will build an entire PaaS environment.
Step 1: In the Tier 3 Control Panel click on the tab titled “Fabrics“. Inside that view, click on “Create Web Fabric“.
Tier 3 Control Panel
Step 2: Fill out the information requested on the screen. The user that you’re creating will be your Tier 3 Web Fabric Administrator. The name becomes part of your URI to access the PaaS API from, and the friendly name below that displays as a description in the control panel. The last piece of information is public or private, the private option limiting access to only VPN users of your Tier 3 Account.
Creating a New Web Fabric
Step 3: Now give it some time. Remember this is not merely a simple virtualized instance of an operating system. What is now happening is a Cloud Foundry environment is being built, Iron Foundry is also added & other enhancements are being applied and built. This then creates an entire Tier 3 Web Fabric that can be used with any of the following tools, languages, and databases.
A few of the languages and frameworks…
Ruby on Rails or Sinatra
ASP.NET w/ whichever .NET Language, it could be C#, VB.NET, or .NET COBOL if you so felt inclined to build a web application with it.
Java w/ Spring and other options.
Node.js Nuff’ Said
Python
Of course the database services too…
MongoDB
MS SQL Server
vmWare PostGreSQL
Redis
These are just a few that are and will be supported in the coming days. The Cloud Foundry base provides a massively powerful core to build off of and extend services and frameworks.
For pushing applications to the Tier 3 Web Fabric, here are some tools to help with that…
vmc-IronFoundry :: This is the same thing as the vmc CLI that is part of the Cloud Foundry Project except that it adds support for .NET pushes from the command line too.
vmc :: this is the default way used by most people working with Cloud Foundry based PaaS Environments.
Cloud Foundry Explorer :: this can be used to view and push .NET applications to the Tier 3 Web Fabric (or any Iron Foundry enabled Cloud Foundry Environment)
Open Source Software, Iron Foundry and More…
In the coming days, weeks, and months I’ll be working with the team here at Tier 3 to drive more capabilities and features. In addition I’ll also be driving the Iron Foundry Open Source effort, pushing to extend what we’ve provided already with the .NET support extension on Cloud Foundry and also more. We here at Tier 3 love the open source community, and we love being part of the community. So with this announcement I wanted to add a big, huge, awesome THANKSto everyone out there passionately involved in and building software that is open source. You all ROCK!
I’ve jumped into committing some source code to the Cloud Foundry Project and I wanted to document the process so far. The Cloud Foundry project is a little trickier than most open source projects, because there are a host of tools around the process. As that is the case, it isn’t a simple github repository with easy to push pull requests and other flows. Instead, there’s a trick to it all and that’s what this blog entry is about. These observations about getting a first pull request submitted:
The instructions, sort of, are located here for contributions: http://cloudfoundry.org/contribute There however seems to be some key parts missing from these (or I didn’t find them on any of the immediate links). The main one being any connection, information, or workflow around the internal git repository that they have setup. That should be more prominently displayed. Can I submit a pull request for the contributions page? 🙂
The github repository. I won’t beat around the bush on this particular observation. The github repository is almost entirely useless. You can’t send pull requests to it, nobody communicates around it, and all the existing pull requests are dead. It is a read-only repo of the internal git repo. So don’t look there for any key pieces of information – check the Google Groups and other information I’ve linked in this blog entry.
The real code base is in an internal git repository held by VMware that has a gerrit (code review) + Jenkins (awesome build server). This is actually a pretty slick setup. Albeit I admit this is absolutely more work for contributors. But when you got a hot potato you gotta pass around the pain (is that even an colloquialism? Probably not, so I just made it up).
There are some very useful google groups that you should sign up for if you intend to contribute code to Cloud Foundry. This is where all the super smart and also friendly Cloud Foundry core team hang out. Even if you aren’t going to commit code, go sign up anyway. You’ll be able to get a lot of very useful information from these guys related to setting up, using, and deploying Cloud Foundry. http://groups.google.com/a/cloudfoundry.org/groups/dir
They also ask you to sign a document related to contributions located here: http://cloudfoundry.org/individualcontribution.pdf basically promising you didn’t steal someone else’s code and that you won’t sue VMware for making this code public.
The JIRA site (another account login you’ll need to setup, it is worth it to, so get one if you intend to commit code. Otherwise if you just want to lurk then don’t really worry about the JIRA site too much.)
Another more immediate way to get help is to bounce into IRC via freenode and join the #cloudfoundry channel. The core devs plus a number of other coders hang out in that room.
Getting it Cloned
Per the instructions above, the first thing you’ll need is the code base. You’ll need to make sure you have a gerrit account first and that you’ve submitted your SSH public keys to gain access. Then get the vcap code base via the gerrit CLI:
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$ sudo gem install gerrit-cli
Password:
Successfully installed gerrit-cli-0.0.11 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for gerrit-cli-0.0.1…
Installing RDoc documentation for gerrit-cli-0.0.1…
$
[/sourcecode]
I left the results of the command in just for familiarities sake. The next command is to clone the repo gerrit style.
Installing commit-msg hooks into ‘vcap/.git/hooks’.commit-msg
100% 2331 2.3KB/s 00:00
Installing tracked git hooks:
$[/sourcecode]
NOTE: This will likely take a long while for the vcap repo. It took me about 45 minutes to clone. That’s based on two seperate machines on two different fast internet connections with two different operating systems. So just be patient.
Then just cd vcap into the working directory and create your changes. Once the changes are committed then pull the latest, merging again if needed, and then push the pull request via the following command.
Once that is done your pull request will be put into the continuous integration build queue. Then someone from the core team will up vote your code or deny it with reasons. You can check out the status:
The OSS-Docs are located on Github, check those out here. They’re not super complete, but the information they do have in them is pretty solid. So check these out while hacking: https://github.com/cloudfoundry/oss-docs.
In my next write up about my efforts with Cloud Foundry, I’ll dive into what I’m pushing and what for. So keep reading, I’ll be back with more good bits.
2. I’m a polyglot dev. .NET kind of burned me out a few years back and I dedicated to learning as many other frameworks, languages, and tech stacks that I could. I’ve never been happier with the variety these days. I’ll admit though I still love to use all those years of experience I have with .NET. Indeed, I have a little soft spot in my heart for C#. Tier 3, along with the Iron Foundry Project, has given me the opportunity to work across languages and stacks including Node.js, Ruby, Objective-C and more.
3. I like to build things, advocate for those things and what they can do for you, for dev teams, and in the end what we developers can build with them. Sometimes this might mean I do it myself, sometimes it means coordinating and leading a team (or as I often say of leads, “serving” the team). Right now I’m getting to do a little bit of both and it is indeed fun and really exciting! This brings me to the answer.
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