Is there Sun behind the clouds?

Andreas Woerle, Daniel Spaude

Rails developer
d:evolute
@d_evolute

What is this about?
Developer perspective on Cloud-Hosting /
PaaS
specifically with CloudControl and Ruby on Rails
Typical Challenges
Forecast
What is this .. PaaS / IaaS?
SaaS
CRM, E-Mail, Virtual Desktops, Communication,
Games, All kind of Webservices, Specific tasks
PaaS
Specific Environments and Runtimes,
Operating Systems, Database, Web Server
IaaS
Storage, Serves, Processing,
Virtual Machines, Network.
What is this .. PaaS / IaaS?
PaaS
Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk
cloudControl
EngineYard
Heroku

IaaS
Amazon AWS
Google Cloud Engine
Microsoft Azure
(DigitalOcean)
...
Retrospective (from a Rails perspective)
At the beginning of Rails:
complicated deploy compared for instance to
PHP applications.
No ready-made hosting packages
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
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)


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
How to deploy with cloudControl
Prepare (only once for every app)
$ cctrlapp APP_NAME create ruby
$ git remote add cctrl REPO_URL
How to deploy with cloudControl
Push code/build image
$ git push cctrl localbranch:stage
How to deploy with cloudControl
Deploy!
$ cctrlapp APP_NAME/stage deploy
How to deploy with cloudControl
Run migrations or other setup tasks
$ cctrlapp APP_NAME/stage run rake
db:migrate
How to deploy with cloudControl
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
AddOns
dependencies as a service
databases, sending mails, message queues,
caching, ssl,
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
Challenges
No persistent filesystem
No guarantee that file changes survive till the next
request
User-uploaded files need to be stored somewhere
else
No persistent IP-Address
Can be a problem with whitelists
QuotaQuardStatic as a solution
Challenges
Addons allow 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 still
not be ignored.
Challenges
Not all dependencies can be easily used.
This can especially be challenging when
moving into the cloud.
Practical example pdftk
Solution: Custom Buildpacks?
Reading tip: 12-factor app
http://12factor.net
12 aspects of a modern,
cloud based app
language and provider
agnostic
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
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!
Docker
=> virtualization without the cost of classical
virtual machines
a docker container only contains the app and its
dependencies/libraries (maybe only 20 MBs)
while a Virtual Machine also includes a whole
operating system (something like 3 GB or more)
much faster start (a few seconds vs. minutes of a
VM)
Docker
same setup for developers, Q/A people,
staging, testing/CI and production
easier setup for new developers joining a
dockerized project
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!
Forecast: cloudy
What will cloudControl do next?
they bought dotCloud
the PaaS provider
which released docker
Questions / Feedback / Discussion