Cloud Foundry Summit 2014: Day 3
Below are the notes on the sessions I liked most: Cloud Foundry roadmap, Project Diego, and Altoros’s case study on software-defined drug delivery.
Cloud Foundry on MaaS at Canonical’s
While most of the Altoros team were listening to morning keynotes, I spent some time playing with a Juju Cloud Foundry bundle together with Benjamin Saller and other guys from Canonical. I was glad that the results of collaboration between Canonical, Pivotal, and Altoros (on Juju charms for Cloud Foundry) were presented at the event, so we had a lot to discuss.
After deploying Cloud Foundry on Ubuntu Orange Box MaaS, we even pushed a couple of apps. Canonical Bare Metal as a Service running in his box:http://ubuntu.com/jumpstart.
Here we go. A full-blown Cloud Foundry Juju deployment atop Canonical MaaS.
Keynotes
As for the summit itself, the last keynotes featured Philips, Pivotal, LDS Church, VMware, and other big names, however, I liked the session on the Diego project most. My notes are below.
- The Morning Welcome with James Watters, VP of Product, Marketing, and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, and Andrew Clay Shafer of Parvus Captus was mostly about the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
- Cloud = Application Enablement and Innovation ≠ IaaS with Ken Owens, CTO, Cloud Services at Cisco: this keynote was about the art of building platforms out of loosely connected services. Cisco announced that their collaboration runs on Cloud Foundry.
- At the Commerce as a Service with Cloud Foundry keynote, René Welches, Product Owner, PaaS Cloud Foundry, at Hybris shared some details on how Cloud Foundry is used by Hybris. Like Axel Springer, they have a deployment that is managed by only two people.
- Onsi Fakhouri, Engineering Manager at Pivotal, rocked at the Diego: Re-envisioning the Elastic Runtime keytalk.
As the name implies, the talk was on Diego, which is in fact a complete re-write of the Elastic Runtime.
“The Cloud Controller has too much responsibility.” —@onsijoe
- At the Building Cloud Foundry Components on the Java Platform keynote, Mike Heath, Principal Software Engineer, LDS Church, shared some war stories on Cloud Foundry clusters, in-production environments, hundreds of apps and developers, etc.
“The whole reason we exist is to make it easier for developers to build & deploy their applications.” —@mheath
- Cloud Foundry and the Design of the Philips Digital Heath Platform with Francois Andry, Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture for the Digital Heath Platform @ Philips, presented a business case on how Philips reduced complexity in compliance using Cloud Foundry.
- At the Towards the Future: The PaaS Enabled Enterprise keynote, Swamy Kocherlakota, Managing Director and Global Head of Architecture and Engineering @ BNY Mellon, David Lewis, Managing Director, Enterprise Delivery Services and Architecture @ BNY Mellon, and James Watters of Pivotal discussed BNY Mellon’s experience with PaaS and their recent joining of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
“We looked at many PaaS platforms. Cloud Foundry offers what were looking for.” —@ksr_swamy, BNY Mellon
“Accelerating strategy execution and changing culture. With Cloud Foundry.” —David Lewis, BNY Mellon
- Hybrid Clouds and Cloud Foundry with Killian Murphy, Senior Director of Product Management, Cloud Foundry (VMware) described a unique Cloud Foundry deployment across two locations on vCHS.
Here are a few of the 15 slides presented.
Why Rewrite?
– Tight Coupling
– Orchestration Issues
– Triangular Dependencies
– Poor Separation of Concerns
– Domain Specific (App, App, App, App)
– Ruby Limitations
– Platform Specific
– Hard to add new features
– Hard to maintain features
Diego 2.0:
– Writing in Golang (big applause)
– Strong Concurrency support
– Strong Low-Level OS support
– Strongly typed
– Explicit error handling
– Promotes developer discipline
Nice session. The project looks very promising.
Lightning talks
The lightning talks of the final Cloud Foundry Summit day were presented by Jeff Hobbs of ActiveState, Renat Khasanshyn of Altoros, Nick Roberts of Canopy, and Jared Wray of CenturyLink. All of them were absolutely amazing.
- Jeff Hobbs, CTO and VP of Engineering @ ActiveState, shared a Stackato PaaS Case Study: “Building Stackato and Lessons Learned Using Cloud Foundry.” From this session, its attendees could learn about the main things that differentiate Stackato from other PaaSes: Docker support, Sinatra, auto-scaling, high availability, and the fact that it is enterprise-ready.
The new architecture of Stackato 3.0Here you can find the slide deck by Jeff Hobbs.
Renat Khasanshyn, CEO @ Altoros, presented a case study, “Software-Defined Drug Delivery with Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.” The talk described how a leading healthcare company aims to save human lives using Cloud Foundry.
Altoros used Cloud Foundry, Ubuntu OpenStack, and HP Moonshot to build a highly available and reliable system that takes advantage of technology to abstract infrastructure and drastically decrease the total cost of ownership. The four levels of HA built into Cloud Foundry and highly redundant components ensure that it works, even if there is no Internet connection.
“Is the effect of Cloud Foundry significant? It is if human life matters to you.” —@renatco
This use case demonstrates how disruptive technology, such as PaaS and Cloud Foundry in particular, can transform the economics of entire industries by abstracting unnecessary workflows and cutting costs with open source.
- .NET and Iron Foundry Incubation: It’s Coming! by Jared Wray, CTO at CenturyLink Cloud, provided some updates on Iron Foundry. As my colleague Vitaly Sedelnik found out the day before yesterday, they run on Windows Server 2012, using .NET 3.5/4.0/4.5. There’s still no ActiveDirectory support, but this is on their roadmap for 2014. Other things in their plans are Visual Studio integration (tools to push app to Cloud Foundry from IDE directly) and PowerShell cmdlet to manage Iron Foundry (native replacement for the cf tool).
- At the Enterprise-Ready PCF—Making The Cool Super Cool lightning talk, Nick Roberts, Global Head of Pre-Sales, PaaS @ Canopy, spoke on how his company is building a PaaS offering based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
The sessions
After the morning of keynotes and lightning talks, we moved on to sessions.
One of the most important topics was “Cloud Foundry Roadmap” with James Bayer, Director of Product Management, Cloud Foundry @ Pivotal. James shared how the platform will evolve in the coming years, including the roadmap for services and BOSH. Naturally, the session was very well-attended. You can check out the entire presentation here.
“Multi-region and designing for legacy apps is not a priority now.” —@jambay
The “Partnering 101: Partnerships, Business & Cloud Foundry” session featured five speakers, all from Pivotal: Nima Badiey (Business Development, Cloud Foundry), James Bayer (Director of Product Management, Cloud Foundry), Scott Frederick (Platform Engineer, Cloud Foundry), Mark Kropf (Runtime Product Manager, Cloud Foundry ), and Matt Stine (Platform Engineer, Cloud Foundry). This session was on how to do business with Cloud Foundry.
“We discourage forking Cloud Foundry—makes it harder for you to get back on the train.”
—anti-patterns by @jambay
The business track
- On the Origin of Services by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Features in the Struggle for Life: The Business Benefits of Microservices with Cloud Foundry” by Russ Miles, Chief Scientist @ Simplicity Itself, was probably the briefest talk on microservices this year. Very informative nevertheless.
- “SaaS Add-on Services for Cloud Foundry Powered by AppDirect” by Paul Arnautoff, Director of Business Development at AppDirect
“The way we build applications has changed.” —Paul Arnautoff
- “The Pivotal Engineering Dojo: Earning Your Black Belt in Cloud Foundry Engineering” by Michael Maximilien, Chief Architect PaaS Innovation, IBM Cloud Labs
- “Delivering Cutting-edge Technology with Swiss Bank-Level Security” by Torsten Boettjer, CEO @ Swisscom Cloud Lab, and Joshua McKenty, Co-founder and CTO @ Piston Cloud Computing. Swisscom is Piston’s customer, they had a lot of success selling Cloud Foundry on OpenStack.
“Combination of app services and data services in one package makes Cloud Foundry appealing for our customers.” —@tboettjer
- “Introducing Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse” by Adam Gunther, Program Director, Cloud Offerings for IBM WebSphere Product Management
- “There Is No Talent Shortage: Organizational Learning Is a Competitive Advantage” by Andrew Clay Shafer, Parvus Captus
“Infrastructure became vaponized! Devs can do provision servers and apps…through APIs.”
—@littleidea
The technical track
The sessions from the tech track (very briefly):
- “Extending Cloud Foundry UAA for Authorizations and Multi-Datacenter Deployments” by Brian McClain, Lead of Infrastructure Engineering @ Warner Music Group. According to Brian, 100% Warner’s development runs on Cloud Foundry now.
“CF CLI is not the most complex CLI you will learn, especially after learning BOSH”
—@BrianMMcClain - “Keep Calm and Ship Services” Chris Brown, Software Developer @ Pivotal, and Tammer Saleh, Director of Product, Cloud Foundry Services @ Pivotal
- “How We Migrated to the v2 Cloud Foundry Service Broker by AppDirect” Christophe Levesque, Senior Software Architect @ AppDirect
- “In Pursuit of Complete Visibility Within Cloud Foundry” Wayne E. Seguin, Stark & Wayne
- “Cloud Foundry Cookbook: Recipes for a Successful Cloud Foundry Deployment in Production” Vinícius Carvalho, Senior Field Engineer @ Pivotal
- “Project Decker: Cloud Foundry with Docker” Colin Humphreys, CEO @ CloudCredo. During this session, I was wondering how many of the DockerCon attendees were in the room. This topic is one of the hottest within the community now, so the hype at the conference was expected, too.
“Fast feedback is the key.” —@hatofmonkeys
- “Using PaaS for Continuous Delivery” Elisabeth Hendrickson of Pivotal
After the sessions, obviously, we all continued with DaaS (Drinks-as-a-Service). 😉
Well, this is it. We should thank all of the presenters and community members for sharing, as well as express our gratitude to Pivotal and other members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation for making this happen. Great job and great event! (I’m also thankful to my colleagues at Altoros who helped me to compile this summary.)
All recaps from the summit:
