As mentioned in a couple of recent posts, I have been building a prototype application using Open Source technologies that I plan to install on a number of available PaaS cloud platforms. The application is written in Groovy (with some bits in Java) and built on the Grails framework. This article is about my use of RedHat OpenShift PaaS and the controls available.
From 2009 to 2014 Dr Mike Norman was the Analyst at The Virtualization Practice for Open Source Cloud Computing. He covered PaaS, IaaS and associated services such as Database as a Service from an open source development and DevOps perspective. He has hands-on experience in many open source cloud technologies, and an extensive background in application lifecycle tooling; automated testing – functional, non-functional and security; digital business and DevOps. in 2014 he moved on to become Cloud Services Architect at JP Morgan Chase.
Cisco, Intel, and Citrix Re-invent OpenStack Networking for the Enterprise
Over the last few months an additional subproject codenamed Quantum has emerged which deals explicitly with networking and has particpation from networking giants Intel and Cisco as well as from Citrix. It’s a mechanism for defining network topologies aimed at providing Layer-2 network connectivity for VM instances running in clouds based on the OpenStack cloud fabric. It is designed to be extensible to allow higher-level services (VPN, QoS, etc) to be built on top, and to cleanly handle the “edge of network” problem (i.e. the binding of the cloud into the internet).
Red Hat releases MRG 2.0 – messaging for the cloud.
Red Hat’s Cloud is to play at all levels in the stack, from IaaS and PaaS through to hypervisor and of course operating system. Each layer is comparable to offerings from competitors.except for MRG – Messaging Realtime and Grid, of which version 2.0 has just been released.
VMware’s SpringSource Ecosystem
As mentioned in my previous piece I’ve been doing some prototyping using SpringSource’s Grails. Grails can be thought of as the top of the stack. If you pick up Grails you would naturally pull in the other pieces of SpringSource, including vFabric and ultimately vFoundry. In a future post I will deal with what happens when you stick Grails onto vFoundry, but at this stage I’ve been assessing the health of the SpringSource Ecosystem.
Citrix announces IaaS Project Olympus built on OpenStack
One of the most intriguing names that has hitherto been at the periphery of the OpenStack initiative is Citrix. Up until last week, Citrix’s contribution was to ensure OpenStack ran on XenServer. However, this week at it’s Synergy event, Citrix made some more sigificant announcements about Project Olympus, through which it aims to provide (in collaboration with Dell and Rackspace) a route to commercial exploitation of the OpenStack codebase. For some time I have been perplexed as to what Citrix is doing. Are they genuinely intending to enter this space? Is this the real play or is it a spoiler?
Why would a Developer choose VMware?
It is interesting to see Edward’s comment that according to EMC/VMware, widespread production deployment of Cloud Apps is 3-5 years off. If that is the case the VMware CloudFoundry initiative should be focused on cutting-edge development rather than porting existing apps, and in much the same way that Microsoft has always courted developers, CloudFoundry should be the latest cool thing for developer productivity. It’s interesting to talk about this stuff in the abstract, and at the strategic level, but sometimes it’s worth understanding what happens when you need to make the decisions for yourself.