It started like this.
[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
string responseValue;
if (null == vcapResponse)
{
responseValue = message;
}
else
{
responseValue = vcapResponse.Description;
}
return responseValue;
[/sourcecode]
…and after a few alt+enter hits…
[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
return null == vcapResponse ? message : vcapResponse.Description;
[/sourcecode]
I ended up with that beauty. Oh yeah. 🙂
…and for today, that’s it. Whew!
One of the things that I do in my work is lead the efforts around creating and leading open source projects. As regular readers may know, I’m big into open source efforts, especially around PaaS. My preferred PaaS offering these days for internal, external and public cloud PaaS is Cloud Foundry (with Iron Foundry for all of my .NET needs). Today the we made the projects official and I’m charging forward with a a great team of people. You’ll be able to use these new user interfaces for Cloud Foundry against Tier 3 Web Fabrics, CloudFoundry.com, Stackato, AppFog and any other company that uses Cloud Foundry at the core and exposes the web service APIs for use!
Thor & Thor.NETIn a couple weeks we’ll be making the github repositories completely public, open sourcing the code & products entirely and looking forward to working with the community to make these tools as awesome as we can. For now, if you’d like to jump into the repositories and see where we are and what we’re up to as we step toward opening them completely, sign up via “early access“. We’ll get you setup on the repo so you can fork, pull and add you’re own signature bits.
Why did we name the project Thor? Well, we’ve been spearheading the Iron Foundry Community efforts for .NET support on Cloud Foundry so we figured we needed someone to bring the hamma to the battle, nobody better than Thor for that!
I’ll have a regular write up of snippets, code and other things I’m working on here so subscribe and give me a follow on Twitter (@adron) and App.net (@adron). Also, for official open source releases of the project check out the Iron Foundry Organization site that has the Iron Foundry downloads, source, Thor and the official Iron Foundry Blog.
First let’s build a standard ASP.NET MVC Application (yes, you can do the same without the MVC Project, but I STRONGLY recommend never creating a standard ASP.NET application again, EVER). This quick run through assumes you’ve already setup a Cloud Foundry enabled PaaS w/ your already installed Iron Foundry components for .NET development. Get an Iron Foundry enabled account here, it’s 100% free, so no reason not to give it a go.
There are a few ways to do this. One, the click on the start page new project option.
Two, the menu based selection option.
Three, the command button option.
So pick your poison and then select the ASP.NET MVC 4 Project Template. On the next dialog, you’ll enter the information of where the project will go and choose the ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application Project Template.
The next dialog select the Basic template, leave Razor selected, and I always leave the unit tests project there also. Once this is done we’re now ready to give our project a little taste of deployment.
Since we’re working in the land of GUIs and .NET, I’ll keep this to a completely GUI based deployment. However, don’t forget that the vmc-IronFoundry is available for pushing also. So don’t fear the CLI, but we’ll skip it for now (tip: It’s practically the same as the other deploys).
On the project in Visual Studio right click and select Push to Cloud Foundry.
A dialog will appear for the basic parameters needed for the deployment. Enter information that you need for your application and click ok.
Now when you navigate to your cloud in the Cloud Explorer UI (Start -> All Programs -> Iron Foundry -> Cloud Explorer) you’ll see the application running under that cloud environment.
As always, it is indeed THAT easy when using a Platform as a Service to deploy to!
A friend and now coworker of mine, Richard Seroter (@rseroter & Blog) decided to do a comparo. I took the infrastructure based deployment, ala IaaS and he took the platform based deployment, ala PaaS. What we’ve done is taken a somewhat standard ASP.NET MVC with Entity Framework, a SQL Server Database, a UX & UI design and got it running locally. From there we then deployed the same application the two respective ways to deploy the web application to a live environment. He took the Tier 3 PaaS (Iron Foundry + Cloud Foundry for the win) and I took the tried and true method of deploying via Windows 2008 Server instances via the Tier 3 Infrastructure.
Here are the steps I went through and for his steps check out this blog article on the PaaS deployment.
First things first, I need two instances. If you’re following along, you can basically use whatever instances or server you want. AWS, Rackspace, or Windows Azure. Based on that there may be a few steps here or there you may need to alter, add or subtract from the process. One for the ASP.NET MVC Application and one for the SQL Server Database. The web app server doesn’t need a ton of resources, so I built it and scaled back RAM and cores to a single core.
In the next step here I’ve selected additional software to be installed on the instance. I’ll need .NET 4.0 so I’ve added this as shown.
After setting up the web server I also setup a database server. For the database server I made sure to allocate some decent resource, setting up 2 cores and 8 GB RAM. I also added the SQL Server installation based on Tier 3’s software packages so it would install automatically when the image is created.
When I setup the SQL Server instance, I used a blue print feature that allows the SQL Server to be installed directly on the image. This of course saved me a lot of time. But it does add to the deployment time of the instance in the cloud.
The first thing we’ll need to do is log into these machines and configure them, standard infrastructure stuff. Open up the Server Manager (which launches automatically on instances) and verify that we have IIS installed on the web server.
Database Server
Next log into the database server and verify that the SQL Server is up, running and create the initial database.
Thusly…
Once I had both of the servers up and running I got the application ready to deploy. First a little schema generation to use to deploy the database.
Once the script is generated then transfer it and execute it against the database on the database server.
Always a good thing, even if all green lights are seen on the SQL execution, go in and make sure the tables are all there.
Web Server
Publish Application (click for full size image)For the web server, as long as IIS is already installed, the setup is fairly easy. First snag the compiled bits that need deployed. We’ll do a direct drop onto the server and get it running.
To get the compiled bits, right click on the Visual Studio Project and select publish. Add a deployment scenario, which I did and set it up to just spit the bits out to a directory. There of course a multiple options at this point to use FTP, WebDav or whatever your choice is. I’m not a particular fan of any of those in particular, they’re all fairly easy.
Interuption!!!
At this point I actually got hit with the “.NET 4.0 isn’t installed…” which it should have been. I opened up windows update and realized that it had not successfully executed nor had the .NET 4.0 install. This happens with all sorts of instances, regardless of provider, so make sure that the bits we need are installed. Also, with Windows, it’s a really good idea to get windows update turned on.
Back to Deployment
Now that we have the built bits just copy them onto the web application server into the inetpub wwwroot directory. Once you have that copied over you would be able to navigate to the IP of the machine this is setup on. At this time you may also want to setup a cname or a-record to point to the IP, so you can use a friendlier URI.
Retrospective
Now think about what has just gone on for a moment. We had to literally build out machines, add software and more. There were a lot of steps. This takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours of actual work. In a larger business or an enterprise environment it could get extended out even further. Because of the extra complexity it could also end up broken, requiring extra troubleshooting and coding. There could even be a host of odd one off configuration issues with the hosting software itself.
Imagine you wanted to host an ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails and a Node.js App on the Server. That would be almost impossible. Consider how much extra configuration knowledge an ops person would need to troubleshoot each one of those frameworks. Just sit back and contemplate the complexities involved for a moment. All the complexity goes away with something like Cloud Foundry or Open Shift. With someone managing that system for you, such as us here at Tier 3 with our Web Fabric PaaS, AppFog, Cloud Foundry, or one of the other providers even more of the complexities just disappear.
Time for Summary & Beer
With all the steps and individual tasks needed to get something running in an IaaS Environment, go check out how slick getting something up and running with a PaaS style environment. The juxtaposition between what Richard had to go through versus what I had to go through is pretty significant. Simply put, for the vast majority of all application development can be done against a PaaS Environment and likely should. Digging deeper into the infrastruture elements is rarely needed except in rare scaling circumstances, such as the volume that Facebook, LinkedIn or Netflix deal with. Even then, as has been stated by these companies, they have a PaaS of their own they often build software to. So why not have this ability where you build software?
One of my key metrics, and I’ll be elaborating on this metric more in the future, is when I get to head out of the office for the day, relax, have a beer, and think about what I’ll get to create next. I call this my “Beer Enabler Measure“. PaaS technologies make it much easier for me to get to the relaxing part of my day a lot faster than IaaS technologies, and both of these make sure that I’m not pulling an all nighter without a beer like traditional hosting environments often do.
In the end, sure, infrastructure can be important and can help in transitioning legacy applications into an easier to manage environment. Today though, if you’re doing web application dev of any type, it should be deployed against a PaaS Environment either private or public.
First off, here’s a tour of my physical space where I do the bulk of my coding when I’m not travelling.
The second bit, a good many months ago I published my developer tools list, which is still available in my blog entry “My Current Windows Developer Machine“. That entry however is very outdated. I’ve since dropped the Windows OS as my primary developer platform operating system for a deluge of reasons. In it’s place is OS-X, Ubuntu, and VMs for Windows and other operating systems. Even though I’ve changed my OS of choice, and boy has life been much simpler ever since, I still do a ton of .NET & C# Development. My toolset however has been minimized for Windows. It now includes the following.
Virtualized Windows Development Machine
Yup, my Windows machine is now THAT simplified. Dev on it is just as easy or easier before. With an SSD drive in my MacBook Air and the iMac I have w/ 16GB of RAM, it’s easy to have the VM perform BETTER than a natively installed version of Windows 7. I know it is hard to believe, but it is true. But I digress, I won’t try to sell you on that. Give it a try, research it, you’ll need to know for sure yourself to make that leap.
My main development OS these days however is OS-X, and here’s my stack of tools for it.
For office things, I sometimes use Microsoft Office, but generally Google Docs works just fine.
For video editing and creation, such as the video above I use ScreenFlow. Again, something you can easily get via the App Store.
I use MOU for editing README.md files on github, cuz it makes life simpler.  🙂
…and that about wraps it up. Enjoy. If you have any suggestions, thoughts, or rants, please let me know in the comments! Â Cheers!
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