Tag: open shift

OSCON 2012 => Monday Ignited, Tuesday OpenShift Session ++

OSCON 2012 Opening Doors
OSCON 2012 Opening Doors

Today kicked off with a monster Reggie Biscuit from Pine State Biscuits. If you live in Portland or are visiting just for the conference and like soul food of the tastiest nature, check it out.

My first day ended up not as planned. Instead of attending sessions I ended up meeting a number of people and discussing the future of Cloud Foundry, where it is headed and in general, the direction of PaaS Technologies. I met Andy Piper (@andypiper) and Raja Rao (@rajaraodv) and discussed Node.js and Cloud Foundry specifically. We then dove into trying out some of the CLI features in the latest VMC builds.

After that I met Mark Atwood for a brief few moments. As always, Mark’s a friendly guy, and might I add pretty smart too. I’ve enjoyed our conversations in the past during the AWS Meetups in Seattle too. He’s always got interesting thoughts and perspectives on open source, linux and now on PaaS Technology too. Ya see, Mark has become the Red Hat OpenShift Advocate. It’s a perfect fit, as Mark loves this stuff!

Ignite!  ….or Bailey’s for more tech talk and #nodejs discussions.

After all of this I almost, and had planned, to attend the Ignite Presentations after OSCON, but instead ended up heading over to talk with some Node.js & JavaScript Coders about some of our latest efforts around getting concrete performance benchmarks for Node.js and some of the various libraries in use.

That brings us to Tuesday…

Tuesday brought forth a super busy, exciting and educational day. I headed straight to OSCON for the OpenShift Workshop with Mark Atwood & Krishna Raman (Mark’s Twitter is @fallenpegasus). The session was great and they hit on a lot of hugely important topics. Let’s go through each of these real quick, as this is where more than just the tech bits were involved.

OpenShift is Truly Open Source Software

Mark & Krishna made a strong point to outline and show how and why OpenShift is open source. For instance, they are following the original precepts of a particular guy named Stallman (http://stallman.org/ if you’re unfamiliar with Richard, he’s the guy who got GNU happening and a major originating advocate of open source software). Mark pointed out that Red Hat is open to keeping the governance of the project completely open, would even cede it to another governance entity when it grows beyond just Red Hat, and they intend to keep all the communication very open and public, as intended with open source projects.

Another thing that Mark and Krishna pointed out, was that the software is on github, and not just in a psuedo “read-only” state, but in an actively useful way, with interactions and tracking on github. The point being that there is no hidden processing of the code or private repositories of code. What you see is what you get in this regard. In addition all of the code that is available, is the exact code that Red Hat is using to actually host the OpenShift PaaS that they provide for testing and demoes. Simply, it is all there available in a completely open, contribution based, interactive, and publicly accessible way.

So far this is even more evident if you do a google search or even trace the twitter activity. They definitely have the search engines working in their favor with all of that searchable content publicly available.

Cloud Foundry & OpenShift

I’m still a huge Cloud Foundry fan, the team and effort and product is getting to be in pretty solid shape. However OpenShift is definitely here to provide some competitive interest. In the end, I’m a fan of PaaS Technology and what it can do for software developers and what we’re trying to achieve on a daily basis. The potential of PaaS to improve, dramatically, the software development lifecycle while reducing the overhead cost is pretty huge. The key is, people have to be aware of and start utilizing the technology well. Just implementing it and saying “I have PaaS” is one thing, but improving your software development process to use PaaS technologies well is where the seriously powerful advantage is.

I’m looking forward to seeing the market unfold and start making progress with these technologies. On that note, day #1 and #2 are finished for me. Cheers!

Ok, Let’s Get Some Definitions & Operational Models Straight Here! PaaS is NOT…

I just got signed up for Cloud Connect Chicago and started checking out some of the talks. One talk jumped out, being that it is about PaaS Technology. After reading it though I immediately felt the need to straighten out some things that looked misleading. Maybe the presenter (JP Morgenthal) will lay these things out well for the attendees, but at this point I don’t know that. I’m making a point to see this session while I’m at Cloud Connect. I’m curious to see how he lays out the content. Here’s the description for the “Navigating PasS: Your Road Map for Application Development“. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has most simply been described as the set of tools above the infrastructure (hypervisor) and contains the applications being served out of the cloud. However, this description covers a large body of resources. Navigating the use of PaaS for application development and delivery requires a very wide understanding of the computing environment and doesn’t fully relieve the user from understanding the infrastructure that is used to operate the PaaS.

Hypervisor + PaaS, You’re Doing it Wrong

First off, the thing that really caught my attention about this session is that it sounds like someone from a very specific company trying to sell a very specific thing wrote this initial description. A PaaS, or Platform as a Service does NOT have to run on an infrastructure hypervisor. It has ZERO association to a hypervisor. All a PaaS should do, ought to be, and generally is regardless who it is made by or who is running it, is a set of software that automates deployment, application distribution to systems serving the application, and generally simplifies the deployment of an application and to some degree databases or data repositories. There is, and should NOT be, any type of coupling, especially any tight coupling, to some hypervisor.

In summary, a PaaS should have zero to do with a hypervisor. It should rely on a simple operating system that has minimal resource overhead and minimal requirements. Take Cloud Foundry or Open Shift. They rely on some of the most capable operating systems, Red Hat Linux (RHEL) and Ubunut LTE to run the PaaS Systems. These are by far some of the best choices in the industry to determine the core of where a PaaS should run. Based on this, it is an operating system, at the core that enables these systems. NOT a hypervisor. If you’re looking to base your PaaS System off of a hypervisor, I’m afraid you’ll have made a severe mistake right off the bat.

Now if you put your Red Hat or Ubuntu OS on a hypervisor, or straight on the metal, you’re fine. Just don’t cross the seperations of concern from the operating system to travel from PaaS to hypervisor. That’d just be…

wrong.

What I Agree With, You Better Understand IaaS

One thing I agree with in the above description and I’m betting JP will put some emphasis on this part of the discussion, is that you absolutely need to have an understanding of your infrastructure that runs underneath your PaaS. There are a multitude of reasons to keep in mind what the infrastructure is doing underneath and how it handles what you’re deploying to your PaaS. Here’s two hugely important topics of concern when you deploy a PaaS into any environment.

  • When an application deploys to multiple instances. What does that mean in your PaaS? Is it on several separate instances? Is it in different geographical areas? Does it go under a different load balancer? How is my database deployed? If you’ve deployed a NoSQL solution, that needs multiple nodes for data integrity, do you know how many nodes are deployed?
  • If I deploy a site to my PaaS, how will it and can it talk to itself or outside via networking? Do I have loop back protection on for security? Will it disallow certain port traffic? What is happening to port traffic and traffic in general?

It looks like the session will cover a lot of these topics. So if you’re looking to attend, I highly suggest checking out JP’s session. I’ll be looking forward to his approach to many of the other topics (check out the site description) such as those I just mentioned along with security, deployment concerns, deploying a single language PaaS (like Apprenda, Cloudbees, etc) and other solutions. In addition to that, I’ll likely be bringing an arsenal of questions, see you all and JP at Cloud Connect!

Day #1 => Cloud Expo & Cloud Bootcamp

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.