Thinking Outside the Container: Deploying Standalone Apps to Cloud Foundry

Thinking Outside the Container:
Deploying Standalone Apps to Cloud Foundry
Jennifer Hickey

© 2012 SpringOne 2GX. All rights reserved. Do not distribute without permission.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

About Jennifer
• Engineer @ Cloud Foundry
• Focused on framework support
• Long time SpringSource-er
• Contributed to many Spring and SpringSource projects
• Passionate about increasing developer productivity in the
cloud.
Contact Info
Twitter: @jencompgeek
Email: jhickey@vmware.com

2

Cloud Foundry Big Picture

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Ap
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Clouds

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Data Services

In
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Public
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Clouds

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Msg

Pr
Services
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Micro
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Other
Services
Cloud Foundry
Apache2 license
3

Core Runtimes and Frameworks
• Java
–Spring
–Grails
–Lift
–Play
• Ruby
–Rails
–Sinatra
–Rack
• Node.js
4

Community and partners contributions
• Python
–Django
–WSGI
• Erlang OTP/Rebar
• PHP
• Perl
• .Net
–On Iron Foundry

5

The Platinum Rule

Treat each framework
the way it wants to be treated!

6

Common Framework Support
• Command-line for application management
–Create apps and services
–Update bindings, memory etc.
–Scale instances
• Access service and app info through environment variables
–Service host, port, credentials
–App ip and port
• A runtime library
–Connect to services
–Retrieve app info
7

Common Framework Support
• Auto-reconfiguration for typical apps
• Access to services through Caldecott
–Creates tunnel for local clients
–Mysql, Mongo, Redis CLIs, etc
• Manifest support

8

This Looks Great! But....

My App Doesn’t Use Any of These Frameworks!

9

Standalone: The “no framework” framework
• Cloud Foundry now supports standalone applications!
• Choose a runtime and provide a start command
$ vmc push myapp
Detected a Standalone Application, is this correct? [Yn]:
1: java
2: node
3: ruby18
– 4: ruby19
Select Runtime [java]:
Start Command: java -jar myapp.jar

10

Uses of Standalone Applications
• Async Web Frameworks
• BYOC: Embedding Jetty or Tomcat
• Distributed polyglot applications
• Workers

11

Call Me Maybe?
• New frameworks are concurrent, asynchronous, event-
driven
–C10K
–Thread per request/response isn’t going to cut it
• Single thread to handle multiple connections
–Callbacks
• Most use Netty for NIO
• Some examples
–vert.x, Blue Eyes, Spray, Unfiltered, Finagle

12

vert.x - Asynchronous, Event-Driven Java

13

SockJS - WebSocket Emulation
• Cloud Foundry does not (yet) support WebSocket
• SockJS emulates WebSocket
–Provides low latency, full duplex, cross-domain communication
channel between browser and web server
• Available for Node.js and vert.x
–Also Erlang, Lua (Luvit), Python (Tornado)

14

Demo
Vert.x with SockJS on Cloud
Foundry


• Workers

16

Why BYOC?
• Framework programming model
–Unfiltered with Jetty support
• Outpace the CF engineers
–Tomcat 7/Servlet 3.0
• http://blog.cloudfoundry.org/2012/06/18/deploying-tomcat-7-using-the-
standalone-framework/
• Be cutting-edge
–Clojure
• http://blog.cloudfoundry.org/2012/09/25/experimental-clojure-support-
in-cloud-foundry/

17

More reasons to BYOC....
• Deploy legacy EJB apps
–TomEE
• Customize Tomcat
–Change logging, server config, etc

18

Demo
Unfiltered with Jetty on Cloud
Foundry


• Workers

20

wgrus-monolithic.war

@Controller
StoreFront

Widget Gadget Accounting Shipping
InventoryService InventoryService Service Service

RDBMS

21

It’s simple to develop but ....
• Lack of scalability
–Scale through replication
–Non-replicable component => nothing can be replicated
–Can’t scale different parts of the application differently
• Lack of deployability
–Deploy it all in one go
–Increased risk of something breaking

22

And....
• Applications are brittle
–Store can’t accept orders unless all services are available
–Failure (e.g. memory leak) in one component can take down
every other
• Monolingual
–Can’t use non-JVM server-side technologies: NodeJS, Rails

23

Modern Applications
• Multiple types of clients
–Mobile
–HTML 5
–Desktop
• Polyglot applications
–NodeJS front-end
–Java/Scala backend
• Asynchronous
–RabbitMQ

24

And....
• Polyglot persistence
–Relational
–NoSQL
–NewSQL
• Social network integration

25

Addressing the Scalability
Problem


The App

27

Simple Distribution

Backend

HTTP

Frontend

28

Widening Distribution

Backend 1

HTTP

Frontend 1

29


Backend 2 Backend 1

HTTP

Frontend 1

29


Backend 2 Backend 1 Backend 3

HTTP

Frontend 1

29



HTTP

Frontend 2 Frontend 1

29



HTTP

Frontend 2 Frontend 1 Frontend 3

29

Scaling out in Cloud Foundry

vmc instances <app> 5

30

Cloud Foundry Manifests

---
applications:
./frontend:
...
depends-on: ./backend
./backend:
...

31

wgrus-billing.war
Accounting
Service MySQL

wgrus-inventory

wgrus-store.war Widget
InventoryService
StoreFront

Gadget
InventoryService

wgrus-shipping

Shipping
Service

32

Demo
Distributed polyglot WGRUS


Scaling out through Akka
• Remote actors
–Location transparent and distributable by design
–Netty based in Akka 2.0
–Needs cluster-like management

34

Remote Actors and Routing

Backend 1 Backend 2

Netty Netty
173.136.3.4:59807
173.14.13.3:57895

Router Router
Frontend 1 Frontend 2

35

Akka: Messaging based remoting


AMQP/
Redis


36

Demo
WGRUS with Akka


Widening Distribution: Messaging Middleware



38

wgrus-billing

Accounting
Service MySQL

wgrus-inventory

wgrus-store.war Widget
InventoryService
Message
StoreFront Broker

Gadget
InventoryService

wgrus-shipping

Shipping
Service

39

Spring Integration
• High-level of abstraction for building message based
applications
• Implements EAI patterns
• Provides plumbing for exchanging messages between
application components
• Promotes loosely coupled components
• Integrates with external messaging infrastructure: JMS,
AMQP, HTTP, Email, File transfer

40

Spring Integration Concepts
• Message channel
–Virtual pipe connecting producer and consumer
• Message endpoints
–The filter of a pipes-and-filter architecture
–Read from and/or write to channel

41

Spring Integration Endpoints
• Endpoint types
–Transformer
–Filter
–Router
–Splitter
–Aggregator
–ServiceActivator
–Inbound channel adapter - read from external source, writes to
channel
–Outbound channel adapter - read from channel write to external
destination
42

Demo
WGRUS with Spring Integration


• Workers

44

Get to Work!
• Update search indexes!
• Email your users!
• Backup your data!
• Upload new data from external storage!

45

Polling for Tweets with Spring Integration
<int-twitter:search-inbound-channel-adapter id="twitter" query="cloud">
<int:poller fixed-rate="5000" max-messages-per-poll="10"/>
</int-twitter:search-inbound-channel-adapter>

! <int:transformer input-channel="twitter" expression="payload.fromUser + ': ' + payload.text" output-
channel="rabbit"/>

! <int-amqp:outbound-channel-adapter id="rabbit" exchange-name="tweets"/>

! <rabbit:fanout-exchange name="tweets" durable="false"/>
! <rabbit:admin connection-factory="rabbitConnectionFactory"/>
! <rabbit:template id="amqpTemplate" connection-factory="rabbitConnectionFactory"/>

! <beans profile="default">
! ! <rabbit:connection-factory id="rabbitConnectionFactory"/>
! </beans>

! <beans profile="cloud">
! ! <cloud:rabbit-connection-factory id="rabbitConnectionFactory"/>
! </beans>

46

Batch Processing with Spring Batch

47

Spring Batch
• Supports Batch API...
–Jobs have Steps
–Steps have Readers, and optional Processors and Writers
• Readers read data
• Processors process data coming into them, optionally transforming it.
Optional.
• Writers write data out

48

Demo
Spring Batch Working it on Cloud
Foundry


Practical Tips

Packaging Your App


Maven Appassembler
• Creates start script and packages all deps in repo dir
• vmc push --path=target/appassembler
–Start command “bin/<scriptname>”
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
! <artifactId>appassembler-maven-plugin</artifactId>
! ! <version>1.1.1</version>
! ! <executions>
! ! <execution>
! ! ! <phase>package</phase>
! ! ! ! <goals>
! ! ! ! <goal>assemble</goal>
! ! ! ! </goals>
! ! ! ! <conﬁguration>
! ! ! ! <assembledirectory>target</assembledirectory>
! ! ! ! ! <programs>
! ! ! ! ! <program>
! ! ! ! ! ! <mainClass>org.springsource.samples.twitter.Demo</mainClass>
! ! ! ! ! ! </program>

51

Gradle
• Use the application plugin
–Run “gradle installApp”
• Creates start script and packages all deps in lib dir
• vmc push --path=build/install/<appname>
–Start command “bin/<scriptname>”

apply plugin: 'application'

mainClassName = "org.springsource.samples.twitter.Demo"

52

SBT
• Use sbt-package-dist
• Creates a zip of all code and deps
• vmc push --path=dist/appname/<zipname>.zip
–Start command “java $JAVA_OPTS -jar <main>.jar”
plugins.sbt:
addSbtPlugin("com.twitter" %% "sbt-package-dist" % "1.0.0")

resolvers += "twitter-repo" at "http://maven.twttr.com"

build.sbt:
import com.twitter.sbt._
packageDistZipName := "bitshow.zip"

mainClass in Compile := Some("bitshow.Server")

53

Eclipse Plugin
• Does the packaging for you
• Deploy and debug standalone Java apps
–Including Scala and Groovy
• Caldecott support
–Tunnel to all services

54

Practical Tips

Accessing Services


cloudfoundry-runtime
• Programmatic creation of service connection factories
–Using ServiceCreator and ServiceInfo classes
• CloudEnvironment class
–Access cloud properties
–Access service info
– No JSON parsing
• Get from the Spring milestone maven repo

56

Using ServiceCreator in Spring Applications
//Provides access to CF service and application env info
CloudEnvironment environment = new CloudEnvironment();
! !
//Retrieve env info for bound service named "mysqlService"
RdbmsServiceInfo mysqlSvc =
environment.getServiceInfo("mysqlService", RdbmsServiceInfo.class);
! !
//create a DataSource bound to the service
RdbmsServiceCreator dataSourceCreator = new RdbmsServiceCreator();
DataSource dataSource = dataSourceCreator.createService(mysqlSvc);

57

Using ServiceInfo for all Java Apps
//Provides access to CF service and application env info
CloudEnvironment environment = new CloudEnvironment();
! !
//Retrieve env info for bound service named "mongoService"
MongoServiceInfo mongoSvc =
environment.getServiceInfo("mongoService", MongoServiceInfo.class);
! !
//create a Mongo DB bound to the service
Mongo mongoDB = new Mongo(mongoSvc.getHost(), mongoSvc.getPort());

58

More Practical Tips...
• Use VCAP_APP_HOST and VCAP_APP_PORT env vars
–If not using cloudfoundry-runtime lib
• Don’t assign your app a URL unless you plan to bind to the
web port
–CF will think your app did not start
• Keep It Alive!
–CF will attempt to restart your app if it dies
• Use $JAVA_OPTS in your Java commands
–Sets Heap appropriately
–Allows debug on local clouds
59

Key Takeaway
Endless possibilities with standalone apps on Cloud Foundry

60

Demos
• Vert.x with SockJS
–https://github.com/cloudfoundry-samples/vertx-socks-sample
• Unfiltered with Jetty
–https://github.com/cloudfoundry-samples/cf-unfiltered-sample
• WGRUS
–https://github.com/cloudfoundry-samples/wgrus
• Spring Batch Workers
–https://github.com/cloudfoundry-samples/spring-batch-tweet-
workers

61

Questions?


Thinking Outside the Container: Deploying Standalone Apps to Cloud Foundry

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