by Omar Mahdi Kais

After announcing the broker sometime ago, we immediately started working to create a BOSH release for the broker and provide users with maximum freedom in how they want to deploy the broker and where they want to use it.

We wanted to ensure that the broker remains very simple to deploy, while simultaneously remaining easily configurable. In addition, since we are deploying on BOSH we wanted to handle as many dependencies as possible.

To accomplish these goals, we moved all service and plan configuration inside the broker’s deployment manifest, which we made sure to keep as simple as possible. Along with this, we also compile the source code on BOSH when deploying so that the user isn’t required to have Go installed if he wants to use the latest source code.

A simple deployment script is also provided so that time from repository clone to production is reduced to a minimum. This new repository along with complete documentation is now publicly available here, so feel free to use it and provide us with any feedback you might have.

by Omar Mahdi Kais

At the ICCLab we make extensive use of BOSH when working on our PaaS systems. We use it to deploy Cloud Foundry, different kinds of services and our own applications and tools on our internal OpenStack cloud.

While working with BOSH and the Cloud Foundry ecosystem in general, we create all kinds of different tools and small scripts to help make our lives easier, improve our workflows and speed up work.

From time to time, some of these small programs become an essential part of the work we do and improve our workflows in such a way that we think the wider Cloud Foundry community will also find them useful.

As such, we have created the bosh-utils GitHub repository to host all these utility programs that are small enough to not necessarily need their own repositories. So make sure to watch the repository for any new utilities we add and any new updates released.

The currently available utilities are:

• Get-CredHub-Var
• Get-Var

“Get-CredHub-Var” is a command line program that lets you very easily search and retrieve any secret stored on CredHub, with search results sorted and categorized by the BOSH deployment the secret is in. You can also make a timestamped backup by using the “backup” argument.

The “Get-Var” utility is similar to the “Get-CredHub-Var” except that instead of acting on CredHub, it searches for and retrieves secrets from local variable files that you specify.

More information and usage details for each is available on the repository. Also please feel free to give us your feedback, open issues or make pull requests. We are very happy to have community engagement and contribution.

Cloud Platforms allow development teams to bring application to production very fast.
In Cloud Foundry a simple ‘cf push’ can be used to deploy your application and bind it to the required services. This works incredibly well for small applications. But as the trend in Cloud Native Applications is going towards microservice architectures, which easily can grow to a large number of decoupled components, it is hard to keep the overview of all the applications and dependencies. It also can get cumbersome and expensive to maintain the deployment scripts and configuration of the applications and very often deployments will get slow and unreliable.

When dorma+kaba was developing exivo, their new trusted, on-demand access control solution for small enterprises, they where exactly facing these challenges, because they had to run and maintain more than 70 apps and 60 services  on the Swisscom Application Cloud. Continue reading