Stackato- a developers experiences and evaluation

by jonasbn for CopenhagenJS

Disclaimer• I am jonasbn - like almost everywhere

• Long time Perl and web developer

• Open Source/CPAN contributor and previously freelance developer in logicLAB

• Currently employed with DK Hostmaster

• I have no affiliation with ActiveState

(My) Developer Needs• Easy access to platform, runtimes and

frameworks

• The least possible gap between development, test and production

• Minimal differences between deployed code and the code in the editor

• reproducibility for transparency

What do we have?• Unit-tests

• Mocked objects and classes, stubs a.s.o

• Local servers / emulators

• Virtualization

• Dedicated environments (dev/test/prod)

• Code - lots of code...So what do we have - >complexity

complexity

• We require magic

• We rely on tribal knowledge

• We need to jump through hoops

Reading all the articles on the Intarweb it sounds like we need... -> the cloud

the Cloud

• What is the cloud?

• What problem does the cloud solve?

• What needs does the cloud address?

• So what is the cloud?

Williamstown Theatre Festival?

Found this in an article on a business website

But everybody talks about... -> Amazon!

Talking Cloud

You cannot ignore Amazon and EC2

Dr. Matt Wood (@mtz)

• Technology Evangelist with Amazon, working with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• http://youtu.be/NT-ccnFMBWA

• from Internetdagarna 2011 in Stockholm/Sweden

Dr. Matt Wood / Heavy Lifting

Dr. Matt Wood / 30%

Points from Dr. Matt Wood

• 30-70% divide

• IT infrastructure friction

• Focus on your core competences

• Focus on delivering value

• http://www.slideshare.net/FDIHdk/ahead-in-the-cloud-matt-wood-amazon

The general issue of development vs. operations is quite wide-spread, see something like the GOTOCPH conference 2011 with a dedicated track

Amazon EC2

• Amazon EC2 however does not get us there - no matter how much elasticity it provides

• http://aws.amazon.com/ I personally was looking for Perl in the cloud - that was not easy

JS/Ruby/Perl in the

• @ActiveState introduces #stackato based on phenona and Cloud Foundry

• http://www.activestate.com/stackato

• http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

Stackato• A micro-cloud

• current version 1.0.6

• out of beta, released 2012.02.29

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) private and public

• Supporting several languages, their frameworks and commonly-used services

Demo 1Simple Node application

Demo 1 - recapNode application

initial deployment

• target, where do we want to deploy

• login, it is all a matter of permissions

• push, a “one-click” CLI deployment

inspecting deployment

• logs• crashes• crashlogs• files

operating• start, start a service

• stop, stop a service

• restart, restart a service

• this is about it, for what I can provide for now, I have no experience with long time operation of a Stackato deployed service

• Oh there is one more thing...

Demo 2the built in management console

Demo 3Yet Another Node application

updating

• update, when an application has been pushed (deployed) this is the command you will use

All the little things

• binding DNS, going beyond mDNS

• binding services (databases et al.)

• resource allocation, memory, instances etc.

• logging (more on this later...)

• now for some architecture...

Support• @ActiveState fora

• #stackato on irc://irc.freenode.org with users and ActiveState staff

• Webcasts

• White papers

• ActiveState are incredibly open and cooperative

Open Source Examples

• @ActiveState examples on Github

• my own fork is on Github

• Github is nice!

Stackato is not

• Open Source? - it is closed and proprietary

• @ActiveState is however dedicated to keeping the micro-cloud solution free

So what is in it?

Targets!• Multiple targets

• development / test / production

• Targets make sense in SCM context

• trunk / branches / tags (releases)

• You could just go for the micro-cloud, but you would loose some of the benefits

But wait there is more!

Demo 4the built in app store

You can have your very own private app store

My Current Road Map• Oracle as a service (Perl driver DBD::Oracle and Oracle

driver distribution issue)

• Cryptographic components (export of PPMs, Perl packages)

• Deployment of custom components

• Service integration (PostgreSQL)

• Full blown examples (Mojolicious over Mojolicious::Lite etc.)

• mDNS and dynamic DNS (might be .local)

• Central logging (syslog)

Conclusion

• The Stackato cloud is awesome

• @ActiveState mean serious business

• I am going to present and propose Stackato as a part of our future infrastructure

Benefits• Easy and controlled access to platform,

runtimes and frameworks

• The least possible gap between development, test and production and minimal differences between deployed code and the code in the editor depending on your cloud deployment

• reproducibility for transparency since the amount of magic is kept at a minimum

jonasbn!

• @jonasbn, jonasbn@logicLAB.dk

• Blogs: logicLAB.org and logicLAB.dk

• Presentation on Slideshare.com

• logicLAB Open Wiki

References• http://www.slideshare.net/FDIHdk/ahead-in-the-cloud-matt-wood-amazon

• http://youtu.be/NT-ccnFMBWA

• http://logiclab.dk/wordpress/2011/11/30/internetdagarna-day-2-matt-wood/

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF

• http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2011/09/wait-what-is-cloud-computing.html/

• http://www.activestate.com/stackato

• http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

• https://logiclab.jira.com/wiki/display/OPEN/Stackato

• https://github.com/jonasbn/stackato-samples

• https://github.com/ActiveState/stackato-samples

• http://aws.amazon.com/

• http://mentalized.net/journal/2010/02/05/hello_rails_3_world/