Community & Events

What is a Platform as a Service (or: PaaS) really?

Posted by Floor Drees
on

I get the question from the title a lot since I started working at anynines. Which is fair enough, with the Everything as a Service trend, one easily gets the terminology confused. The extension as a service is used in many core components of cloud computing including communication, infrastructure, data and platforms (there we are!). Let’s look at a few of those in more detail.

Infrastructure as a Service

Providers of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offer computers – physical or more often virtual machines – and other resources. A hypervisor – powered by OpenStack in our case – runs the virtual machines (VMs). IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers.


Quite possibly funniest IaaS reference in a Twitter bio ever.

Why would you use IaaS rather than ‘bare metal’? Well, cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility basis (where the cost reflects the amount of actual resources allocated and consumed), which is oftentimes cheaper. (more…)

PaaS

Hello, OpenStack Icehouse.

Posted by Heiko Krämer
on

We are excited about the final release of OpenStack Icehouse. Since the Icehouse Design Summit in Hong-Kong the team of contributors added a new integrated component (Trove), completed more than 350 feature blueprints and fixed almost 3000 reported bugs. So, what’s new (read: updated) in OpenStack 2014.1?

Find source code and a complete lists of features and bug fixes, for each integrated project:
Nova (cloud computing fabric controller), Swift (Object Storage), Glance (Image Service), Neutron (Networking), Cinder (Block Storage), Keystone (Identity), Horizon (Dashboard), Ceilometer (Telemetry), Heat (Orchestration) and Trove (Database Service).

The OpenStack Icehouse Release Notes contain an overview of the key features, as well as upgrade notes and current lists of known issues.

Community & Events

Talking JavaScript in Berlin

Posted by Floor Drees
on

Last Thursday we met the rest of berlin.js (JavaScript Berlin User Group) at co.up in Berlin Kreuzberg. After a quick news round by the organizers about unconf (did you know the cool people at hood.ie are giving away a couple of tickets?), froscon and rejectjs, we dove right into four great JavaScript-related talks. To summarize the evening…

Node Deployment

Bodo Kaiser likes to get a bit of both worlds when hosting his node apps. Which worlds? Well, that of a PaaS environment and the virtual machine. Going with Arch Linux – where one does not ‘have to bother with a lot of configuration’ – and nginx to have multiple subdomains on one server, Bodo deployed his classic Hello World app live.


The happy lady bottom left is Sara. She very much enjoyed the meetup.

Bodo has got it all written down for you. He threw in a little extra for the Berlin.js crowd talking about git clone --bare LINK and how to execute different hook scripts. (more…)