Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, March 2016: Ops/Devs Certification
The upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit remained a prime topic of conversation during the March 2016 Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) conference call. The CFF’s said hundreds of potential talks have been submitted. Notifications will be sent out on March 18, and the final schedule announced on March 23.
As in the past, speakers will receive complimentary registration to the summit, which will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center on May 23-25. The CFF team is working to lock down dates and venues for summits in Europe and China this year, as well.
There’s also a possibility of a post-summit, an add-on event to be focused on BOSH, with details to be worked out.
Certifications being created
Operator and app developer certifications for Cloud Foundry formed a second big topic during this month’s call. The CFF’s said there was a recent two-day workshop focused on defining what the certifications would be and how they would work. She said the expectation is to have them available by Q4 of this year.
As envisioned, they would be held online, with a duration of three hours, and be a rigorous examination of the applicant’s skills rather than, for example, a multiple-choice test. The word “psychometrician” was invoked, with Stormy noting that such a professional testing expert is involved with the process.
Yet, many details for both the operator’s and app developer’s tests remain to be worked out. There have already been several meetings concerning the operator’s test, and there will be a two-day workshop focused on the app developer’s at the conclusion of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the end of March in Lake Tahoe, CA. Anyone interested in participating in the process of defining either of the certification tests is encouraged to contact the CFF.
Creation of these certifications should be a major accomplishment for the Cloud Foundry community and ecosystem, it seems. Stormy said that some companies have already said they would commit to certifying all of their Cloud Foundry people—a number in the hundreds or even thousands in some cases.
Technical updates
The call also featured numerous posted updates from project managers and associates. These included:
CLI ( , Fujitsu)
- Released cf CLI v6.16.0 (exposing routing services, space-scoped service brokers, etc.) Soon to be followed by v6.16.1 that fixed a regression in `cf sso-code`.
- Next release will expose TCP routes and multiple app ports.
- Completed the GoCD-> concourse CI migration.
- Struggling with deploying CF release and Diego and Routing on bosh-lite environments locally and on AWS.
- Close to publishing the online cf command line reference guide.
- Internally shared a proposal for a better way to declare routes in app manifests. Rewriting to include two options based on feedback received so far, before I share it on the CF Dev mailing list.
Routing ( , Pivotal)
- Support for the Route Services (a new class of marketplace service is now supported) shipped with cf-release v231 and CLI v6.16. Integration with Go Router.
- Had some mixed feedback, so interested in getting additional feedback whether current integration is intuitive and flexible or whether it’s non-standard in some way.
Shannon added some discussion about support for BOSH-deployed CAs, and authentication of routing with tokens with UAA. Those interested in the specifics of this topic are encouraged to contact him.
CAPI ( , Pivotal)
- Nicholas is currently Dojo’ing as the new PM. Contact him via e-mail
- v3 Tasks Alpha—will likely hit release marker this week—two stories ready for acceptance and two making their way through the pipeline.
- Replaced NFS with WebDAV. WebDAV is the default for bosh-lite.
- Continued working towards new API docs based on Slate, preview here.
Diego (Eric Malm, Pivotal)
- Adding support in BBS for relational store. Fairly confident it will allow for scaling up to 200K instances, finishing validation with BBS benchmark test suite against MySQL.
- Also spiked on in-memory cache in BBS, but didn’t resolve other problems with etcd at that scale.
- Can now install set of trusted certs in cflinuxfs2 containers, providing to all Linux containers.
- Removed DATs, Diego Smoke Tests in favor of CATs, CF Smoke Tests.
- Documented and published team tooling to create a CF+Diego deployment on AWS. Cross-team pairing with the Persi team to add volume management to the executor.
- After scale, focusing on Diego operator tooling, import-path service for the CF Golang projects, investigating active rebalancing; proposals to circulate soon.
Eric also referred to an inception meeting to discuss setting up an import paths service across Cloud Foundry. “We’ve long had the desire to have an officially supported operator tool for support of inception of Diego,” he noted. Those with an interest in this topic are encouraged to contact him.
Garden (Dr. Julz, IBM)
- Shipped Guardian-Release v0.0.1 on Monday. Passes CATS, not ready for production yet, though.
- 2-3 weeks work remaining to reach feature parity with Garden-Linux.
Guardian Pivotal tracker – Guardian GitHub repo
Greenhouse/.NET ( , Pivotal)
- Lots of chores, fixing the build, etc. in the past several weeks.
- Investigated a feature request from cf-dev about health checks being inconsistent on Windows. “For now, we have decided not to implement any chances, as they would break existing behavior, and we believe, will end up with a net-negative experience for users.” Context: #112914163.
- Fixed an issue in streaming in large droplets (or slow environments) to be consistent with Diego on Linux behavior.
- Continuing to move forward on incremental features and chores with a single pair.
Buildpacks/Stacks (Matthew Schuetze, Azul Systems)
Matt Schuetze of Azul Systems spoke up here about his company creating a prototype, working Java buildpack “that doesn’t require a fork to use it. We’re weaving in a Zulu option to the existing buildpack,” he said.
UAA ( , Pivotal)
- UAA 3.2.0 Released
- Zonify the SAML Cert/Key Pair & JWT Signing/Verification Keys. This will lay the foundation for key rotation.
- Merged SAML IDP Support from GE.
- Persistent revocable tokens in progress.
- Spring REST docs for UAA in progress.
- External OpenID Connect IDP support in progress.
Abacus ( and , IBM)
- Close to release 0.0.5, published 0.0.5-rc.1 preview.
- Highlights: improvements to metering config, time window handling, app runtime usage metering, security, performance, and added support for MongoDB.
- 0.0.5-rc.1 preview release notes here.
Dr. Max noted that a set of three blog posts was published at the Cloud Foundry Foundation website, and thanked Stormy for working with the team on them. “We’ve seen an increase in activity in people trying out Abacus,” he noted.
Runtime OG (Michael Fraenkel, IBM)
- Metrics are over Loggregator, Collector is no longer used.
- Staging and Starting are prevented during an evacuation or shutdown.
- Staging is stopped if the application is stopped.
Also, Dr. Max presented the results of a survey he took about the nature of the CAB calls. The survey received 57 responses, with the consensus that the calls were working well. A slight tweak was to have project managers comment only on issues that weren’t already posted on the written agenda, leaving more time for Q&A during the calls.
The next monthly call is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, April 13 at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.
