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

May 8, 2012
Cloud Speak, Platform (as a Service), Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry
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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.

Cloud Foundry 1 Year Anniversary & New Bits (Code Included)

April 11, 2012
Cloud Speak, Platform (as a Service)
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Today was the 1 year anniversary for the Cloud Foundry Open Source PaaS Project. For info on what PaaS is, especially related to open source and related to Cloud Foundry check out my 5 part series at New Relic’s Blog; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.1, Part 3.14159265, Part 4, and Part 5 (which I know, it is really a 6 part series).

Updates, Updates, and More Updates!

Today was pretty cool and jam packed with code & information. There are a load of updates in the Cloud Foundry Repository now.

One of the big parts of the new features released today, isn’t so much a feature, but an entire open source project based around actually building & deploying an entire Cloud Foundry PaaS Environment called BOSH. Here’s my takeaway notes about this project, what it does, and how it can help Cloud Foundry usage.

BOSH (https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh.git)

The first thing to do, when learning about and using BOSH is to hit the groups:

What is it?

BOSH is a YAML based Cloud Foundry deployment tool. It provides a way to deploy a multiple image machine into a new Cloud Foundry environment. These images, just basic VMs, are referred to in the BOSH System as Stem Cells.

There is more to learn about BOSH, but for now suffice it to say there is some serious potential in what it enables for building out a Cloud Foundry Environment. Up until now this process was a manual installation effort which would take take a lot of energy and take an long time.

Cloud Foundry Additions?

There are a lot of Cloud Foundry changes that are in the works and a lot that went in. However, from an external point of view, there isn’t a lot of visible changes. No new user interface or anything like that. The biggest changes have been around stability, scaling, deployment, and other core capabilities.

For further information and news on the release, check out some of these write ups:

Cloud 9 IDE ROCKS!

Outside of the Cloud Foundry Project there are other things working toward interoperability with Cloud Foundry and building in features that will help you work against Cloud Foundry. One of those companies is Cloud 9. They’ve enabled single-click deployment via their Cloud 9 IDE.

That’s it from me for now. I’ll have a lot more regarding Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry, and other projects related to PaaS soon.

Wrapped Up @ The Fort of Awesome, on to the Iron Foundry, and new Tiers…

March 28, 2012
.NET Bits, Cloud Speak, Conferences, Meetups n' Such, My Updates
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New update and bits coming up in the near term. I wrapped up my work with AppFog’s Fort of Awesome and am now putting together blog articles & technical material for New Relic these days. They’re an extremely great company with an absolutely stellar team. However you may be asking, “Adron, YOU WRITE CODE ALL THE FREAKING TIME, you’ve got to be doing more than blog entries!!” and you’d be right. These blog entries are more than just opinions and such, I’ll be putting together demoes and some hard core examples of distributed architectures, trending against big data, node.js hackery, and all sorts of other stuff. But there is also my next update below that’s a lot of fun code…

Tier 3, Federated Clouds, and Iron Foundry

I’ve stepped in to take the lead on the Iron Foundry Project (so go sign up and fork it!!) and to work on the stability, governance, and code around Cloud Foundry too! It’s going to be a blast! In addition to that I’m helping to build some cool things at Tier 3. In the near future I’ll have a lot more information regarding what these things are.

At Tier 3 we have a massive Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure offering. It’s a pretty impressive setup, so much so that I’m leading some of the efforts there, so I’m not just saying that! Keep an eye on us too, because we’ll have some very cool things coming up (did I say that already?)  :)

Cloud Foundry Hackathon PDX, Cloud Foundry Open Tour, and Coder Society

Cloud Foundry Hackathon PDX

The Cloud Foundry Hackathon is on April 14th at Puppet Labs. Check out the Lanyrd Site and Calagator for calendar and RSVP. This is going to be an awesome event which will also be in partnership and extension of some of the work we’ll start at Coder Society on April 7th. So if you’re into hacking on the Cloud Foundry core bits or if you’re interested in hacking on apps deployed to Cloud Foundry come and hack with us. In addition I’ll be putting on two workshops:

  • On Premise, Off Premise Cloud Foundry => We’ll dive into, and get hands on, with identifying and connecting Cloud Foundry Environments regardless of their premise. Removing boundaries, that’s what this is about.
  • Cloud Foundry + Iron Foundry and Bridging the Gaps => Now we’re talking FULL stack across every major stack. Iron Foundry, the missing linq in Cloud Foundry. Adding .NET & having it play nicely with Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and more. We’ll also dive into SQL Server, Mongo, and how to make the best use of RDBMS + NoSQL bits. Making the most of the abilities with PaaS.

Cloud Foundry Open Tour, The PDX Stop

The VMware sponsored Cloud Foundry Open Tour has a stop lined up epic Portlandia! There will be a pretty bad ass crew there of people you’ll want to meet and talk to about Cloud Foundry’s direction, design, enterprise cloud offerings such as Stackato, Tier 3, and others. On twitter, if you don’t follow these people and you’re stepping into the future with PaaS, you should follow them (click their names for their respective twitter account):

…and others, come attend and you’ll get to meet them all. I’ll also be there and you can follow me on twitter too if you want (@adron).  ;)

Our good friends from ActiveState will also be there, bringing their awesome Stackato Cloud Foundry based offering! The Iron Foundry Project also just released full support for the Stackato based Micro Cloud Foundry VM with new Micro Iron Foundry bits too.

Coder Society…

Oh yeah, the Coder Society, I’ve got the info on the Coder Society Inaugural meet up announcement coming tomorrow first thing in the morning at 5am. If you haven’t checked out Coder Society yet, hit the site and join the list. No, don’t get up that early, I’m just guessing that’s when I’ll be done with it and click on the publish button!  ;)

OS Bridge 2012++ Hacker Lounge++

February 21, 2012
Cloud Speak, Conferences, Infrastructure, My Updates, Platform (as a Service), Presentations and Speaking
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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

February 17, 2012
.NET Bits, Architecture, Cloud Speak, Infrastructure, Platform (as a Service)
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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.

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