Category: Cloud Speak

OS Bridge 2012++ Hacker Lounge++

I’ve submitted some talks to OS Bridge so I hope to see a ton of people there! 🙂 The two sessions that I’ve put forth, if accepted of course, go something like this.


Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service (PaaS) (45 minute session)

This session will cover the major advances of platform as a service technology, what’s available in the OSS space to enable faster, easier, higher quality software development cycles in the cloud. The session will complete with a demo of PAAS technology in use, deploying a highly scalable, distributed & dispersed web application.

This session will show why PAAS is the way of the future for application deployments. Enterprise, small business, and especially startups will want to learn more about the available PAAS OSS technology and also learn about what is coming in the near future.

The presentation is setup to not only cover the immediate technologies of IAAS and SAAS in relation to PAASbut also real life examples of how PAAS gives a competitive advantage to any software development effort.

I’ll be using a presentation, asking the audience questions to involve them, and also some prospective video along with a real production style deployment of code to involve the audience.

Putting It Together, Letting Apps Lead the Cycle, TDD in the Cloud (1 hr 45 min)

I’ll be taking a deep dive into cloud architectures and how to build applications, generally at the PaaS level mixed with a little IaaS, to get people rolling with high velocity, high quality, and without the need to worry about the little things.

Want to learn about why PaaS and cloud computing is altering the very fabric of the development cycle? Want to know how to dive in with some abstractions and behavioral practices on the cloud, using PaaS, to bring apps, prototypes, and UX to market faster than anyone else? I’ll be touching on all of these things during this long form session. The sessions will step through these core concepts and ideas.

  • How to get up and running using cloud computing technologies and specifically to take advantage of PaaS providers.
  • How to bring UX designs and prototypes into a usable state even faster.
  • How to bridge that gap between development, test, QA, user acceptance testing, staging, and production (or whatever environments…) without blowing the bank.
  • How to scale, once the cycle is in place and continuous deployment is ready.

OS Bridge == Great Time, Great Experience, and Lots of Learning

OS Bridge is by far one of the best conferences in the northwest, in addition it isn’t stupidly expensive (sign up now for a cheap $225 bills (in April it bounces up to $300, so hurry up, that $75 bucks will feed your for the whole week at the spectacular Portland food carts!)
Either way, I hope to see all you bad ass coders there so I can buy ya some drinks, eat some meals with everybody, and starting thinking about the next awesome thing!

Going Hard Core: Vmware’s Cloud Foundry Forks Uhuru & Iron Foundry Review

Back in December Uhuru Software and Tier 3 released two different forks of Cloud Foundry that enabled .NET Support. I wasn’t sure which I wanted to use, since I had some serious Cloud Foundry work I was about to dive into, so I’ve picked them apart to determine how each works. This is what I’ve found so far.

Uhuru

Iron Foundry

That covers the basic links to the downloads, community, and other points of presence, now it is time to dig into some of the differences I’ve found. First though, I got a good environment setup to test each of the forks, from within the same Cloud Foundry Environment! So this is how I’ve set this up… Setting up the Virtual Machines w/ VMware Fusion I suspect, you could tangibly do this with some other virtualization software, but VMware is probably the easiest to use and setup on OS-X & Windows. I haven’t tried this on Linux so there’s another space I’d have to give it a go. Using ESX I also suspect this would also be extremely easy to setup. It’s up to you, but I’m doing all of this with VMware Fusion. The environment I’m using for this comparison consists of the following virtual images:

Micro Cloud Foundry Instances

These instances were easy, I just downloaded them from the Cloud Foundry Site on the Micro Cloud Foundry Download Page. The simple configuration is outlined in “Micro Cloud Foundry Installation & Setup“.

Iron Foundry Instances

For this, I downloaded the available VM on the Iron Foundry Site here.

Uhuru Instances

I setup the Uhuru Instances using the instructions available from Uhuru Software here.

Setting up Some Controllers

So the first thing I did was dive into setting up a controller, or actually two, because I wanted to have an Iron Foundry Environment and a Uhuru Software Environment. After that I’d then try to mix and match them and figure out differences or conflicts. The instructions listed under the “Uhuru Instances” has information regarding setup of a controller for the Uhuru Software Environment, which is what I followed. It is also a good idea to get setup with Putty or ready with SSH for usage of Cloud Foundry, Uhuru Software, and Iron Foundry.

AppFog, Fort of Awesome & Node PDX Updated!

Time for the secret to be out of the bag. I’m currently working on contract with the awesome company of AppFog in the Fort of Awesome. Let me tell you, it is indeed awesome too! You might ask why I am working with them? How do I align with them? What is it they do?

Well you’re in luck, I’ll tell you all about it.

A few months ago, I started really digging into PaaS more. Not that I needed a reason, because I’m one of those “PaaS is the future” guys. I see this as a huge shift, kind of like when the developer world moved on from Assembly and punch cards to C & C++. It’s a big deal, and it is shifting the way companies build apps, the way they stay competitive, and stand out and above the herd with better process, better capabilities, and more efficient operations. PaaS, is the path to tomorrow.

What is AppFog building? Currently if you’re fortunate enough to have beta access, you may be able to play with the amazing PaaS offering that they’re putting together, and I’ve stepped forward to help put even more awesome into it with their kick ass team! So what will AppFog be aiming for? Well, it is an impressive list, check it out!

Help us out, take the poll and get your favorite technology added to the list! There’s a whole list of other things that will be coming too, this is just the basic big hitters list.  🙂

In other news, Node PDX has just finished the list of speakers, we’re finalizing the rest of the sponsors and related things, and just waiting (ok, we’re really busting our butts over here running around to make sure this is a cool event for all you node coders!)

Some of the cool things you’ll be able to look forward to is…

…and awesome Saturday “open drinks” party w/ New Relic! So be sure to be there for that…

We’ve aimed to get everyone a Node PDX t-shirt…

…and more. So go get RSVPed already, time is running out.

Devops Invades with PaaS & CloudFoundry

I have jumped head first into CloudFoundry over the last few weeks. In doing so I’ve started working with AppFog, IronFoundry, VMware and other devops tools.  There are several avenues I’m taking to get more familiar with CloudFoundry based PaaS technology. Here’s a short review:

Writing

I started writing a series which is being published by New Relic around “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service“.  Part 1 is live NOW – so go give it a read!  🙂

Working

Currently I’ve been working up some Enterprise Prototypes using the IronFoundry Technology. The idea is to provide a seamless deployment option for Enterprises that may have a very mixed environment of public and private computing options, virtual and non-virtualized environments, and any array of other capabilities. I’ve also been toying around with Windows 2008 Server Core, which I’ll have more about shortly.

Public Cloud AppFog

AppFog provides a public facing PaaS supporting PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, MongoDB and a lot of other packages. They’re currently in beta right now, which I was fortunate enough to snag access to, but I’m sure the covers will come off soon enough! The underlying technology is built on CloudFoundry, providing a robust, scalable, and capable infrastructure connection to provide PaaS on.

In addition to AppFog there is the CloudFoundry.com offering, which I’ve tested out a little bit, but mostly focused on AppFog and on building out…

Private Cloud Capabilities w/ Public Cloud Style Infrastructure

I’ve built out some images to test out how CloudFoundry and IronFoundry works. I did pull down the provided virtual machines but I’m also building out my own to understand it better. The Ruby + C# that I’ve seen from the VMware crew & Tier 3 team has been great so far (I always dig reading some solid code).

That’s it for this short review, more to come, and let me know what you think of my entry “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service” over on New Relic’s Blog.

South Sound .NET Users Group + AWS, Visual Studio, Toolkits, and Explosions!

If you live in or around the south sound region near Olympia, would like to hear about the AWS Toolkit and SDK for Visual Studio, come and check out the South Sound .NET Users Group on at Olympia Center, 222 Columbia NW, Olympia, Washington.  The meeting will be on January 12th at 7:00pm.

Slides & Links to Code are already available!

Overview:  During this presentation I will provide an overview of what is needed to get started using Visual Studio 2010 with the AWS Toolkit & SDK. We’ll also cover the basic design ideas behind the do’s and don’ts of cloud architecture and development. There will be some hands on coding (if you’d like to bring a laptop to follow along) and we will deploy code (pending a wireless/cat5 connection) into AWS Cloud Services & get EC2 instances up and running live!