it's in the cloud

It’s in the cloud!Provisioning and how the (pkg)cloud can help

Ken Perkins

Developer Advocate

@kenperkins

2RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.COM

About Memmmmm….. Beer….


About Me

• Beer!

• Joined Rackspace March 2013

• 1st engineering hire at clipboard.com; Acquired by Salesforce.com May 2013; 120k users; node.js based

• Core committer for pkgcloud; 5th most commits; most in last year.

• I kind of have a sports addiction…


Overview

• What is the cloud really? APIs on Datacenters!

• Why provisioning for the cloud?

• APIs are awesome, but writing your own wrapper sucks

• Why do you care? I can get a 32gb server for €49/mo...

• Pkgcloud use cases & capabilities

• Why did Rackspace hire my to work on this anyway?


What is the “cloud”


It’s in the cloud!


What is the cloud anyway?

• Datacenters & Applications with APIs

• Infrastructure-as-a-service• Compute, DNS, storage, load balancing, databases, email,

orchestration, & more, all highly available

• On demand resource creation

• “Web-scale”

• If you build it, they will come


Provisioning for the cloud


Provisioning for the cloud

• On-Demand Environments

• A/B Deployment

• Integration with Orchestration

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

• DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself applies to infrastructure too!• From dev (maybe using vagrant?) to production


Writing your own API wrapper sucks


Writing your own API wrapper sucks

• But, but, require(‘request’) makes it so easy

• Maintenance hell. Just add another feature…

• It’s cool, I can open-source my wrapper

• Idiosyncrasies of the API

• It’s all about priorities• Spend your time on stuff only you know: Your Product and

Your App.


But, Dedicated Servers!


But Dedicated Servers are Cheap!

• Limited capacity

• Provisioning lead time

• Not truly on demand

• Shifts control away from the developer

• $50/mo for cloud only gets you a 1-2gb server :S

• Sometimes both is a winning strategy too


About pkgcloud


About pkgcloud

• Multi-Cloud provisioning package for node.js

• Created by Nodejitsu Dec 2011

• Born out of node-cloudservers npm package from Nodejitsu

• Users include Rackspace (Cloud Monitoring), Bloomberg, Nodejitsu, Advanced Simulation Technology (Rossk), among hundreds of others


Why pkgcloud?

• Single convention, multiple clouds

• Uniform vocabulary

• Abstract out peculiarities of individual providers and APIs

• Node is great for command line tools too!


What is multi-cloud anyway?


What is multi-cloud?

• Current Providers:• Amazon, Azure, Digital Ocean, Joyent, Openstack, Rackspace

• Generalized models across providers• i.e. every compute provider has:

client.createServer(options, function(err, server) { ... });

• Code is mostly portable (options signature for example)

• Caveat emptor


Multi-Service

• Compute• AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Openstack, Joyent, DigitalOcean, Telefonica

• Storage• AWS, Rackspace

• Database• Rackspace, Azure, IrisCouch, MongoHq, MongoLab, Redistogo

• DNS• Rackspace

• BlockStorage• Rackspace*

• Load Balancing• Rackspace*


Example 1Using pkgcloud with CloudFilesCode @ http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cf

http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cf

http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cf


Example 2Using pkgcloud with CloudServersCode @ http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cs

http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cs

http://j.mp/pkgcloud-cs


Why is Rackspace involved?


Why is Rackspace involved?

• We created OpenStack, and then gave it away!

• We’re all about community

• Developer Advocates for PHP, Java, .Net, golang, Ruby, Python, node.js

• We already have core committers on jClouds, Fog, libcloud, among others

• We’d rather engage and interface with existing open-source communities than try to fragment them


What’s Next?


The Future…


The Future

• Need to add more implementations of providers within services (i.e. make them truly multi-cloud)

• Refactor Databases entirely

• More services (queuing, autoscale, orchestration, email, etc)

• Command Line tools (rossk!)

• …


Takeaways

• Design for the cloud from the start

• Focus on work only you and your team can do; not writing API wrappers

• Put more control in the hands of you and your developers


Further Info

• Github:– http://github.com/nodejitsu/pkgcloud

• IRC– #pkgcloud on freenode

• Website:http://developer.rackspace.com/devtrial

• Contact info:[email protected]: @kenperkins


Q&A

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