Tag: appfog

AppFog and now Tier 3, CenturyLink is on a Roll!

I feel like I’m being followed by CenturyLink. I shouldn’t be surprised, they should follow me!  😮

But faux paranoia joking aside, it is interesting to see them snapping up two key players in the Cloud Foundry space that have built .NET support into it at an enterprise level. They’re obviously intent on capturing that market. Now they just need to snag Basho and make those services available without being damaged by windows – in other words, enabling the back end and on premise, but remove the (absurd) notion that it ever is put on Windows Server.

With that I add another congratulations to Teir 3 becoming part of the CenturyLink Family, joining the likes of AppFog and others to help build the next stages of PaaS and cloud technologies combined.

Here’s some of the past news of the AppFog acquisition a few months ago.

…and now the Tier 3 acquisition news.

So what does this mean for that PaaS Technology? Especially the elements that I’ve lead, built and been a part of in some way or another the past ~2 years? Well, that’s to be seen, but I have several exceptionally good ideas about what will be done. In subsequent weeks I might even add to some thoughts around this as I have in the past. We’ll see if things keep going the way leading developers want them to go or if this is a sign of consolidation and innovation grinding to a crawl.

It is, after all being consolidated into a corporate entity that has historically had no reputation or focus around developing actual new solutions or a culture that can make that happen. I wish the dev teams of Tier 3 and AppFog the best, but CenturyLink better do well by them or it’ll turn into a standard bleed rate of lost brain power and the innovation trust will disappear.

On that note, congratulations to everyone and good luck!

Riak, Yokozuna, Node.js & Easy 9’s

The inaugural Riak Meetup kicks off tomorrow at 7:00pm. The crew at AppFog will be hosting the meetup, with several of the Basho team coming into town with two talks:

  • 7:15pm – Eric Redmond @coderoshi will present “Next Generation Searching with Yokozuna“. Riak Search was created to expand Riak’s query options.  It’s worked well enough the past couple years, but it’s time to move forward. Yokozuna is the next generation of Riak search, built on the solid Distributed Solr platform. We’ll see a preview of what Yokozuna does, what it’s going to do, and how that’s a marked improvement from the existing Riak Search.
  • 8:00pm – Nathan Äschbacher, developer at Coradine, will present “Riak & Node.js: The Hunt for Cheap, Easy Nines“. Portland-based Coradine makes an innovative aviation application that helps pilots the world over. Riak will power the next generation of apps and services coming out of Coradine. Nathan Äschbacher, developer at Coradine, will take you through:
    • A quick history of our experience with Riak
    • How it came to be we opted to use it at Coradine
    • Some of the known hurdles we were going to have to overcome (like cloud deployment)
    • Some of the development issues we’ve encountered
    • Why Node.js was a good fit for us and interfacing with Riak
    • Abandoning Redis in favor of Riak Memory-store for caching and 2i

So if you’re into airplanes, data, big and small, giant 9’s or other technical aspects around data storage and the respective distributed systems that enable advancements in this technology, come down to AppFog this Monday and check out these presentations.

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.

PaaS Help! Know any PaaS Providers?

I’ve been diligent and started a search of Platform as a Service Providers, so far my list includes:

  • EngineYard
  • Heroku
  • AWS Beanstalk
  • Windows Azure
  • AppFog
  • Tier3
  • CloudFoundry
  • OpenShift
  • IBM PaaS
  • Google App Engine
  • CloudBees

Who else is there? Help me out in creating a list of every possible offering we can find!  Cheers! Please leave a comment or three below with any I’ve missed.  Thanks!