I’m offering a two-day, intensive, hands-on training course at the upcoming O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in Boston, MS. The class is entitled Cloud-Native Application Architectures with Spring and Cloud Foundry In this class you will have the opportunity to implement an easy-to-understand storefront system (complete with product search, details, reviews, and recommendations) as a cloud-native architecture using Spring and Cloud Foundry. In addition, you’ll get hands-on exposure to the Netflix OSS family of technologies.
The gauntlet has again been dropped in the world of cloud interoperability. The dueling factions include those asserting that competitors to Amazon’s web services (principally OpenStack) must adopt AWS’s API’s in order to remain viable, and those that believe such “API cloning” will do nothing more than stunt innovation. If you were to ask me, I’d say that we’ve seen this play out before. Remember the “Clone Wars” that began in the late 1980’s and that persisted for the better part of two decades?
One of the great things about Cloud Foundry is that it is a great enabler. Tall words. But what do they mean? Essentially, Cloud Foundry (and any other well-designed PaaS) enables us to do things as developers and operators that would be extremely difficult in a traditional deployment environments. One particularly valuable area of enablement is our new found ability to practice Continous Delivery, meaning that we continuously prove our ability to deliver working software by continuously treating each code commit to a system as if it could be deployed to a production environment.
I was inspired by Brian McClain’s post on bringing Haskell to Cloud Foundry using Cloud Foundry v2 buildpacks, so I decided to go on a buildpack journey of my own. Since Clojure is the language I most enjoying “toying around with,” I thought I’d try to deploy a simple Clojure web application using the Heroku Clojure Buildpack.
To reiterate some of the coolness around buildpacks, they are what allows a PaaS like Cloud Foundry or Heroku to support various runtimes without first building that support into the core platform.
Wow…it seems I only post to this blog toward the end of May. Well, that all changes now. You see, as of June 3, 2013, this blog is going to become one of many aspects of my new “day job.” On Monday, I start my life as a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry by Pivotal. What’s a Community Engineer? Quite honestly, I’m not completely sure of the answer to that question yet.