I have observed that discussions about CloudFoundry often lack accurate context. Some questions I get that indicate context is missing include: What Java version does CloudFoundry support? What database products/versions are available How can I access the server directly? There are a few reasons that the questions above are not relevant for CloudFoundry (or any modern PaaS environment). To understand why, it’s important to understand how we got to PaaS and where we came from. Landscape When computers were first becoming a common requirement for the enterprise, most applications were monolithic. All applicaiton......
Continue Reading
It’s possible to add a custom buildpack to Stackato or Helion Development Platform so that it’s available to all applications. When using an installed buildpack it is not necessary to include a manifest or identify the buildpack. Instead it will be selected by the detect script in the buildpack. All files are on the cloud controller node which eliminates download time and bandwidth. Package the buildpack Prepare your buildpack for installation by adding all files to a zip file (of any name). The bin folder should be in the root of the zip......
Continue Reading
In the past PaaS has been rigid and invasive for application developers. CloudFoundry aims to change that perception of PaaS with the use of Buildpacks. A Buildpack allows an application developer to define his deployment environment in plain text. Some refer to this as infrastructure as code since the aspects of a deployment environment that were previously handled by system administrators on dedicated servers now exist in plain text alongside the application files. What’s available out-of-the-box? Before diving into custom buildpacks, a lot of people will ask “What is available out-of-the-box with CloudFoundry?”.......
Continue Reading
Previously I detailed the process to create a buildpack for Stackato or Helion, including reconfiguring the buildpack to be self-contained. In both previous examples, the compile script performed a configure and make on source to build the binaries for the application. Since the configure->make process is often slow, this can be done once and the binaries added to the git repository for the buildpack. Pre-compile nginx The first step is to build nginx to run in the docker container for Stackato or Helion. These steps were previously in the compile script, but now......
Continue Reading
I previously documented the process to create a buildpack for nginx to use with Stackato or Helion Dev Platform. In that buildpack example, the compile script would download the nginx source using wget. In some cases, the time, bandwidth or access required to download external resources may be undesirable. In those cases the buildpack can be adjusted to work offline by adding the external resources to the git repository. The new structure would look like this. Updated compile script The only bulidpack related file that would need to change to accommodate this is......
Continue Reading
CloudFoundry accommodates buildpacks which define a deployment environment. A buildpack is distinct from an application and provides everything the application needs to run, including web server, language runtime, libraries, etc. The most basic structure for a buildpack requires three files inside a directory named bin. The buildpack files discussed in this post can be cloned or forked at https://github.com/dwatrous/buildpack-nginx Some quick points about these buildpack files All three files must be executable via bash Can be shell scripts or any language that can be invoked using bash Explicit use of paths recommended detect......
Continue Reading
One of the major strengths of CloudFoundry was the adoption of buildpacks. A buildpack represents a blueprint which defines all runtime requirements for an application. These may include web server, application, language, library and any other requirements to run an application. There are many buildpacks available for common environments, such as Java, PHP, Python, Go, etc. It is also easy to fork an existing buildpack or create a new buildpack. When an application is pushed to CloudFoundry, there is a staging step and a deploy step, as shown below. The buildpack comes in......
Continue Reading
CloudFoundry is an opensource Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology originally introduced and commercially supported by Pivotal. The software makes it possible to very easily stage, deploy and scale applications, thanks in part to its adoption of buildpacks which were originally introduced by Heroku. Some software design principles are required to achieve scale with cloud foundry. The most notable design choice is a complete abstraction of persistence, including filesystem, datastore and even in memory cache. This is because instances of an application are transient and stateless. Since this is generally good design anyway,......
Continue Reading
I’m about to write a few articles about creating buildpacks for Stackato, which is a derivative of CloudFoundry and the technology behind Helion Development Platform. The approach for deploying nginx in docker as part of a buildpack differs from the approach I published previously. There are a few reasons for this: Stackato discourages root access to the docker image All services will run as the stackato user The PORT to which services must bind is assigned and in the free range (no root required) Get a host setup to run docker The easiest......
Continue Reading
It seems like most of the development around CloudFoundry and bosh happen on Linux or Mac. Getting things up and running in Windows was a real challenge. Below is how I worked things out. **Make sure you have a modern processor that supports all virtualization technologies, such as VTx and extended paging. Aside from the deviations mentioned below, I’m following the steps documented at https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-lite Changes to Vagrantfile I’m using VirtualBox on Windows 7. To begin with, I modified the Vagrantfile to create two VMs rather than a single VM. The first is......
Continue Reading