Tag: paas

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!

Seattle Code Camp – A Summary

Wow… that was great.

I had three presentations. Well, honestly it was more like two presentations and a brainstorming session with about 3 dozen really smart people!

First there was the “Node.js Rulz! JavaScript takes over the full stack“. This session went pretty well, and I hope I got a lot of developers riled up to give Node.js a try. I discussed the various testing, framework, and other libraries needed to get going with development. I also did a test deployment against Tier 3’s Web Fabric PaaS (Cloud Foundry powered AWESOME). If you want to try out this deployment model, a sand box is available for free over at the Iron Foundry Project (.NET extensions for Cloud Foundry). Just sign up and we’ll get you added ASAP.

In summary, I went end to end with Node.js. Overall, it’s a beautiful thing that I highly suggest people give a thorough look at.

The next session I did was “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service“. This session covers my primary live of wrok and advocacy these days. It involves a key facet of software development that I’ve dubbed the “Beer Factor”. More on the “Beer Factor” later.  🙂

In this session I covered the history, reasons for, and overall impetus of PaaS (Platform as a Service) and why it matters to software developers. The general gist is, it is changing the very way we can and will be doing software development. The change, is absolutely for the better. Developers, consider yourself empowered. Also, more on this in the near future.

The last sessions, which was more of a large scale brain storming session, was “Putting it all together, letting apps lead the cycle, TDD in the cloud“. This session really kicked off a lot of different thoughts around the MAJOR gaps in cloud computing development. So I’m going to break out some of those key points below:

  • There is no logical, easy, or well defined way to test deployments to the cloud. If you’re AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Tier 3, AppFog or any other company – deployment is not simple. A big impetus is to test production, something that absolutely has to be done. The gateways or checks in deploying software; for the underlying infrastructure, the platform, or anything that is geographically dispersed, multi-instance, or similar is very difficult. For software developers, devops, and the like, we want this to be better. We all brainstormed a bit around this and the resounding sentiment was, “damn, this is hard, yet so powerful and enabling that we have to figure out better ways to test and do deployments into cloud environments”
  • Chaos Monkey must bet let loose on the WORLD!!  See below:

    @adrianco chances of open sourcing Chaos Monkey? Room full of Cloud Devs want, egged on by @adron#seattlecodecamp

    @iC@adron it’s on the way, actively being cleaned up for github

    Adrian Cockroft RULZ! Thx Adrian, we’ll all keep an eye out for that! 🙂

  • One of the other things that was brought up was the endless options, and thus complexity, around the data story these days. This translates to, how do we simplify deployment of relational, document, object, key value or other types of databases? Each needs a particular type of default deployment. How do we as developers create a better model to get our data repositories of choice up and live. With Cloud Foundry the data deployments are a single node, which isn’t really useful for things like Riak, Mongo, Couch or databases that need to start with three or more nodes. It’s ok for relational databases, but it is very common to need that hot swappable database running somewhere. These are all questions that need answered to make the data story of PaaS technologies more palatable.
  • Monitoring and intelligent systems. Some suggestions around monitoring, which came from the question of how to test a deployed system before and after deployment, where pretty solid. Nodes need to be intelligent enough to be able to identify they’re live, active, and doing X, Y or Z. Controllers need to understand and know how to interact with these nodes. The back and forth is somewhat complex, but I can imagine just like with Cloud Foundry, they’re is a viable and simple solution among all of this with the appropriate abstractions and build out of systems.

That’s my summary. I had a blast, got to see a lot of people I know and meet a lot of new people I didn’t know. I always love being able to catch up and really expand on what our efforts are individually and collectively as a development community. Great fun, until next time, cheers!

Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity

A lot of things were mentioned during the panels and sessions during DeployCon. Some things I agree with, some things I don’t.

The “Web Way”

There is one prevalent thing that came up over and over, the “web way”. What’s the web way? It is building horizontally, scalable, with RESTful APIs, and applications at an upper tier that are loosely coupled to any back end, and generally geographically independent (i.e. dispersed). This could be a mix of IaaS and PaaS, public or private, or a mix of all these things. Above all, it is about building horizontally instead of vertically, so that one can scale big, really big.

It was generally accepted in the dozens of conversations I had about the “web way” that the enterprise was only realizing that their idea of “big” and “redundant” just doesn’t even compare to what has been built using ideas from the Internet Generation. The Facebook PHP scale has blown away almost any enterprise’s scale problem, Twitter’s piping relationships across big data trumps most enterprises service bus concerns, Netflix’s streaming makes most enterprise’s issues with data transfer seem like a child’s game.

But all this isn’t to spite or hate on enterprise teams. They have an immensely important job to do. With all of these advances, and with management allowing enterprises to step closer into the community and get involved with things built the “web way” there is a massive upside. The enterprise is getting closer to cloud technologies. They’re learning how to leverage their on premise assets for various reasons, such as not throwing out the investment, and public or private cloud tech together.

Combing these things, and the complex needs of the enterprise together is all benefits, they’re getting the bleeding edge technology and research basically for free. All while effectively finding ways for a slow migration to not damage existing investments, day to day operations, and improve overall resiliency and services within the enterprise itself.

Overall, a huge win-win for everybody.

Data Gravity is Vital to Understand for Application Architecture

Dave McCrory kicked off the Data Gravity analogy to application and data source spacing. It is a pretty flawless analogy which brings us a much clearer understanding around application architecture when it comes to where data sources and where applications sit within a system. It also helps to define the value, cost, and gravity of data in relation to it’s location relative to the application.

With this topic brought up, every single tie it hinged around people fighting the gravity between data and applications. The difficulty in using cloud technologies, big data and other things is highly advantageous for companies, but as Dave points out in his presentations and writings about data gravity, it is getting exponentially more difficult to pull apart data and applications to rejoin them somewhere else. Such as the massively more scalable, powerful expansive public cloud.

These conversations lead to a growing opportunity space in the industry, moving data. This could be done with physical moves of drives, big pipes, pipes as a service or a host of other offerings. So far, very few are doing much in this realm, understandably considering the difficulty. But I’m betting that we’ll start seeing some serious efforts put into this. One of my personal notions is the idea of going cloud to cloud, we’ll see if anything pops up in the near future. If not, I might have to make a play on that myself.

…and last but not least, DeployCon!

DeployCon was the major reason I attended Cloud Expo. DeployCon was about PaaS Tech & the future movement of cloud technologies. Even though the rest of the conference, for most enterprises, seems bleeding edge, DeployCon was about the truly bleeding edge technology. Not only that, the elephant in the room is about the new king makers of IT, of technology, and of business in general; the software developers. Yup, I said it. We might want to stick IT on things here and there but the fact of the matter, over the next 10 years – if the IT moniker even sticks – it’s going to be more and more developers, business apps, and business development – not more network or system admin roles that are needed. The abstractions are pushing developers into an even more pivotal role in a company and providing even greater benefits to business. You can ask any number of people in the PaaS space, from AppFog, AppHarbor, Tier 3, Stackato/ActiveState all the way to Windows Azure (they need to actually show up next time, just saying!). They ALL SEE THIS HUGE CHANGE coming. Not only do they see it, they are experiencing the beginnings of the change.

So hats off to an excellent job Krishnan (@krishnan @ Rishidot Research) for putting this together! Wendy White (@wendywhite) for throwing in major logistics support and all the others too! I had a blast and am looking forward to the next event.

Thanks also to the fire starters and technologists on the panels! You guys know who you are, good job! Here’s a few parting shots of the awesome people I got to meet and talk tech with!

Parting Shots

@brianmmcclain & @markkropf enjoying a round of drinks!
@brianmmcclain & @markkropf enjoying a round of drinks! These guys are smart, seriously. (click for full size)
The one and only @wattersjames the man with impeccable taste @mortonheroku and the man with the plan @guy_marion
The one and only @wattersjames (thanks for the fire starting!) the man with impeccable taste @mortonheroku and the man with the plan @guy_marion (click for full size image)
The beautifully witty @briellenikaido and @mortenheroku showing us the where the premo tastes are in New York City.
The beautifully witty @briellenikaido and @mortenheroku (GREAT Sake choice btw) showing us the where the premo tastes are in New York City. (click for full size image)

I Can Talk About It Finally! => Tier 3 Web Fabric Platform as a Service (PaaS)

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
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
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.

Eclipse & STS for Java :: this is the extension that integrates into Eclipse.

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 THANKS to everyone out there passionately involved in and building software that is open source. You all ROCK!

Stay tuned, this is merely the beginning.

Learn About TDD, Cloud Foundry, OSS, and OS Bridge

I’ll be attending OS Bridge (you should attend too, it’s only a few hundred bucks!!) this year. Hopefully I’ll be presenting also but I need everybody’s help! If you would, favorite (with the star) my presentations/workshops. Also leave a note of feedback related to how you’d dig seeing me present!  (I’ll owe ya a beer, feel free to call me on it at OS Bridge and the round is on me!)

Presentation #1:  Putting It Together, Letting Apps Lead the Cycle, TDD in the Cloud (Click Here to Favorite)

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.

Description

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.

Presentation #2: Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service (Click Here to Favorite)

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.

Description

This presentation 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.

This presentation will build upon my New Relic Blog Series on “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service”: