tales from the paas ops frontlines

8/10/2019 Tales from the PaaS Ops Frontlines

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Is there Sun behind the clouds?

Andreas Woerle, Daniel SpaudeRails developer

d:evolute

@d_evolute


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What is this about?

Developer perspective on Cloud-Hosting /

PaaS

specifically with CloudControl and Ruby on Rails

Typical Challenges

Forecast


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What is this .. PaaS / IaaS?

SaaSCRM, E-Mail, Virtual Desktops, Communication,

Games, All kind of Webservices, Specific tasks

PaaSSpecific Environments and Runtimes,

Operating Systems, Database, Web Server

IaaSStorage, Serves, Processing,

Virtual Machines, Network.


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What is this .. PaaS / IaaS?

PaaS Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk

cloudControl

EngineYard Heroku

IaaS

Amazon AWS Google Cloud Engine

Microsoft Azure

(DigitalOcean)

...


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Retrospective (from a Rails perspective)

Many tools emerged from the ruby

environment which were adapted in other

technologies Capistrano for deployments

Chef / Puppet for server

provisioning

Despite these Tools:Still a lot of special

knowledge needed


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ca. 2009: Heroku

significantly simplified

deployment process

git as a central tool

ca. 2012: cloudControl

supports ruby friendly and in Berlin :)

Retrospective (from a Rails perspective)


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cloudControl deployment process

easy deploy

via git + simple console command

easy and fast setup of new deployments and

environments

zero-downtime deploy out of the box

less worries about software- /security-

updates


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How to deploy with cloudControl

Prepare (only once for every app)

$ cctrlapp APP_NAME create ruby

$ git remote add cctrl REPO_URL


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Push code/build image

$ git push cctrl localbranch:stage


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Deploy!

$ cctrlapp APP_NAME/stage deploy


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Run migrations or other setup tasks

$ cctrlapp APP_NAME/stage run rake

db:migrate


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cloudControl supports multiple deploys of

the same app out of the box

in the previous example, our deploy was

called stage

http://stage.APP_NAME.cloudcontrol.com


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AddOns

dependencies as a service

databases, sending mails, message queues,

caching, ssl,


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AddOns

the addon provider will take care of aspects

like fine tuning, security updates,

configuration etc

but you can also provide your dependencies

by yourself


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Challenges

No persistent filesystem

No guarantee that file changes survive till the next

request

User-uploaded files need to be stored somewhereelse

No persistent IP-Address Can be a problem with whitelists QuotaQuardStatic as a solution


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Challenges

Addonsallow to outsource updates and

security issues for dependencies too - but

they can tempt to not think enough about the

specific configuration needs of your app

Charset, encoding, but also performance

optimization, e.g. for databases should stillnot be ignored.


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Challenges

Not all dependencies can be easily used.

This can especially be challenging when

moving into the cloud.

Practical example pdftk Solution: Custom Buildpacks?


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Reading tip: 12-factor app

http://12factor.net

12 aspects of a modern,

cloud based app

language and provider

agnostic
http://12factor.net/


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Reading tip: 12-factor app

Examples

Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies in Ruby, you do this via the Gemfile and bundle exec

Store config in the environment

your codebase / repository shouldnt contain any

deployment specific configuration

Execute the app as one or more stateless

processes


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Forecast: cloudy

Docker

open source container technology to isolate

OS resources from each other

application/processes run on their own

separate container but still using the same kernel of the host system!


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Docker

=> virtualization without the cost of classicalvirtual machines

a docker container only contains the app and itsdependencies/libraries (maybe only 20 MBs)

while a Virtual Machine also includes a wholeoperating system (something like 3 GB or more)

much faster start (a few seconds vs. minutes of a

VM)


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Docker

it makes your app (and its

context/dependencies!) much more portable

decreases the It works on my machine

phenomenon

Docker is a gamechanger in the context of

building and running apps in the cloud!


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Forecast: cloudy

What will cloudControl do next?

they bought dotCloud

the PaaS providerwhich released docker


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Questions / Feedback / Discussion

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