Impressions From the Cloud Foundry Summit

As last year we attended the this year’s Cloud Foundry summit taking place in San Francisco (9-11 June) to meet and talk to a number of Cloud Foundry enthusiasts. One of the major topics at the summit was the extended Cloud Foundry foundation which now owns 34 companies and anynines is proud to be one of them.

With joining the foundation and the trip to San Francisco we wanted to participate to the Cloud Foundry movement which wins a lot of momentum at the moment. And after 1,5 years of experience anynines had with Cloud Foundry it was also time to give something back to them.

Table of Contents

• The Roadmap
  • Interesting Projects
  • The Architecture style for the Cloud
  • The Cloud Foundry DACH user group

The Roadmap

The current Roadmap was presented by James Bayer (@jambay) at the summit and contains some exciting features (unordered):

• API to control an A/B routing to applications
• Zero-downtime and Near-Zero downtime deploy
• Dockerfile push
• .NET support
• Customizable App Healthchecks
• SSH access to App Containers
• Lifecycle hooks for source code management systems (SCM)

Hence the development of Cloud Foundry is agile the roadmap is as well and features and also prioritization can be changed. Furthermore James mentioned that the backlog is open and proposals are welcome!

The slides for James roadmap track can be found here.

Interesting Projects

At the moment there is an ongoing effort to rewrite a major Cloud Foundry component – The Droplet Execution Agent (DEA) which is responsible for running your application instances. The rewritten component also comes with a new name (DIEGO).

Onsi Fakhouri (@onsijoe) explained the reasons for the rewrite in an excellent talk, some of them are:

• The DEA is domain specific, the only entity it handles are applications. DIEGO talks about “Tasks” and “Long Running Process”
• It was hard to add and maintain new features
• Simpler platform porting (The DEA was coupled to Linux)
• DIEGO is written in go and utilize go’s strong concurrency support and promotes a better developer discipline.

To get an idea of the state of DIEGO you can have a look at the dedicated backlog.

Another project that was presented and and cannot be ignored in this blogpost was Decker. Decker was written and presented by Colin Humphreys (@hatofmonkeys) and provides way to deploy applications along with a docker image.

The Architecture style for the Cloud

Another very interesting talk held by Matt Stine (@mstine) was named “Cloud Foundry and Microservices: A Mutualistic Symbiotic Relationship”. The development using the microservices approach prevents a monolithic application architecture and so promotes well known tactics in computer science. Due to the single responsibility of each microservice the backing datastore (MongoDB, MySql, …) for each microservice can be picked by the specific needs and the development, maintenance and deployment of such a system is much painless.

In combination with Cloud Foundry microservices evolve a huge power since this architecture enables an efficient scaling of the applications.

The Cloud Foundry DACH user group

Motivated by the atmosphere of the summit a Cloud Foundry user group was founded in Europe. We don’t have to cross the Atlantic now to get in touch with Cloud Foundry enthusiasts.