Cloud Native Infrastructure Automation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks for visiting Pivotal at VMWorld. My name is Julia and today I want to tell you about the Pivotal mission…. From the technology, to the people, to the way people interact with technology, Pivotal is transforming how the world builds software. We’re going to spend time looking at how Pivotal Cloud Foundry can transform your infrastructure to deliver any application or data source ‘as a Service’. But first a word about how we got to this point.
• #3: We are entering into a fundamentally new era of business, where people have to build new experiences and new capabilities that are driven by software in order to compete in the market. Competing in this service oriented world means moving fast with consistency and reliability. Speed has to be balanced with operational excellence. This is the cloud native advantage.
• #4: In the not so distant past, software and systems were separate. Software was created by developers. Systems were built and maintained by system administrators. Many organizations adopted heavy handed change management processes to slow the rate of change and reduce the number of incidents, often with large infrequent changes resulting in brittle systems that tend to fail catastrophically. The relationship between developers and system administrators are often also brittle and prone to catastrophic failure. The cloud native approach focuses more on minimizing the impact of incidents by releasing small batches into architectures designed to be operated with partial failure and recovered quickly. Cloud, Devops, Microservices, Continuous Delivery; these are all aspects of the same phenomena. The words that describe high performing teams delivering faster, but also delivering consistently and reliably at scale. That’s what cloud native means.
• #5: Pivotal breaks down cloud native technology into 3 layers, which is all supported, reinforced and optimized by cloud native culture. At the bottom, we have API driven cloud native infrastructure automation. This abstracts the provisioning and configuration of computing, networking and storage resources. Then we have a cloud native container scheduling runtime responsible for building, running and operating applications. The top layer consists of frameworks that enable the rapid development of cloud native applications with reusable components and patterns.
• #6: The focus of this session is infrastructure automation, but don’t forget there is a synergy between the different tools and of course the culture. Our approach to infrastructure automation assumes there is already some kind of cloud API to handle provisioning resources. That’s where cloud native begins, with the infrastructure service API integration.
• #7: Here is the goal, the motivation, the why, simply stated: We want to allow individuals to easily version, package, deploy and operate software. This also needs to be consistent, reliable, scalable and secure. Wouldn’t it be nice?
• #8: The systems need to be able to change. Software needs to be updated. That’s what delivery means. Software also fails. The system needs to detect and recover from failure, while minimizing any impact. Capacity needs to be balanced against demand. Adding and removing capacity must become routine and trivial. These capabilities are mundane and uneventful in a a cloud native world. Patching all of production in a non-event.
• #9: BOSH is the tool chain we use to provide the capabilities. BOSH is open source and part of the Cloud Foundry project. The best way to thing of BOSH is as a distributed package manager and process orchestrator. BOSH makes sure the right code is on the right machines, configured properly with the correct processes running across a distributed infrastructure. BOSH has integrations to all major public and private cloud infrastructure. Pivotal, together with our customers, support production deployments across almost every combination of cloud. Search the internet for ‘learn bosh’ if you want to get into more details.
• #10: Similar to other configuration tools you might be familiar with, BOSH is based on declarative idempotent resource abstractions. What do all those words mean? They mean that BOSH isn’t told what to do, BOSH is told what should be, and then does the right thing to make that be true. The previous generation of configuration tools provide idempotent abstractions for the resources on a server, but that leaves a lot of ad hoc orchestration to build and operate a service. In BOSH these declarations abstract a service deployed as a distributed system, where servers are a lower level primitive in the service abstraction, and BOSH handles the orchestration with rolling no downtime upgrades and canary deployments out of the box.
• #11: In addition to leveraging these service abstractions to turn anything into ‘as a service’, Pivotal adds additional functionality, an enhanced user experience and support in our Cloud Foundry product. Pivotal packages an increasing number of additional services that are vetted to be managed by this infrastructure automation including databases like highly available clustered mysql and cassandra, messaging with RabbitMQ, and Continuous Integration with Jenkins. We are building a platform to handle the undifferentiated infrastructure automation and make that available so organizations can focus on delivering value in their domain. We’d love to prove what that cloud native platform is capable of on your infrastructure.
• #12: Thank you for your time today, we welcome you to check out all the Pivotal presentations and encourage you to ask one of our technology experts any questions you might have. We would love to spend time telling you more about how Pivotal’s Cloud Native Platform is transforming how the world builds software.