Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Tag: cloud-native application

Open Cloud Day 2018

14. June 2018 / / 1 Comment

This year we had the pleasure to organize and host one of Switzerland’s most prestigious cloud events, the OpenCloudDay. On the 30th of May, we welcomed the around 80 participants at the ZHAW School of Engineering in Winterthur for a day rich with technical talks, demos and networking possibilities for Cloud Computing practitioners and experts in Switzerland.

Welcome and introduction to Open Cloud Day 2018

The program of the day started with two opening talks covering very timely topics in the field of Cloud Computing. The first talk, given by Thomas Michael Bohnert from the ICCLab, was a critical view on what many consider as the next evolutionary direction of Cloud Computing, namely Edge Computing. We got the speaker’s perspective on the motivations, the potential obstacles and open issues for this paradigm to definitely break through (or maybe not) as the next Cloud Computing frontier. The second opening talk was given by Sacha Dubois from Red Hat and focused on the potential of Ansible Tower for the automation and management of Hybrid Clouds. After a general discussion on the possibilities offered by Ansible Tower to managing both on-premise and public cloud workloads, a live demo showed how this would work in the practice.

Presentation on Ansible Tower by Red Hat

During the second part of the morning and the first part of the afternoon, two technical sessions were ran in parallel. Several topics were covered as for instance Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration in the Cloud, and the CNCF activities during the last year, the challenges with the adoption of Web Application Firewall for the DevOps methodology and much more. An insightful presentation was given on the current cloudware technologies and what to expect from future post-clouds systems. Practical experiences were also presented as, for instance, in setting up a Kubernetes cluster, on the use of Ansible for cloud solutions. Also a workshop about the setup of an  oVirt infrastructure for an open source Cloud Management Software was organized in the morning. For a complete program of the technical talks please visit the webpage of the OpenCloudDay.

Attendees during one of the technical presentations

The two final technical talks of the day were given by Niklaus Hofer from Stepping Stone and Jens-Christian Fischer from SWITCH. In the first of the two talks, a presentation was given on the analysis of storage performance for a Ceph cluster. More specifically, the focus was on the comparison between the new backend solution for the Luminous Ceph release, i.e. BlueStore, and the FileStore solution for storing data to disk. Open challenges and further open points of investigation were also given.
The last talk brought up a different point of view regarding all the technical solutions to run a cloud. Based on the experience of SWITCH in running an OpenStack/Ceph based cloud for the Swiss Academic community, the importance of the users’ role in using the technology was put in focus. The user’s perspective is not to be overseen as this puts additional challenges and requirements for solutions to be deployed as the experience of SWITCH clearly highlighted.

The program of the day also offered a total of seven demo presentations on the following topics: Cloud Robotics, Edge Computing, CAB, CNA, Service Tooling, ElasTest, T-Systems solutions.

One of the demos presented by the ICCLab

Migrate OpenShift applications with os2os

30. September 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

One of the desirable properties which users expect in a modern cloud-hosted application is portability. Users want to migrate portable applications between private and public clouds or between different cloud regions. With container images as portable application implementations and emerging sophisticated container runtimes, this should be an easy task. But when a containerised application starts to become more complex, a container platform or an orchestration tool needs to be deployed. This add specifics blueprints and together with the persistent data makes the migration of the application tough. This means that the application is not in a condition to be moved as easily between clouds or even between the orchestration tools or container platforms, losing the desirable portability property. With the idea in mind that the next generation of Cloud-Native Applications must be deployable to different cloud providers as the requirements change, we are proud to announce the first proof of concept release of os2os, a tool to migrate cloud-native applications between OpenShift installations. While our research on application migration is not limited to this single container platform, we see it as one of the more popular and technically interesting ones.

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Cloud-Native Microservices Reference Architecture

3. July 2017 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

How are cloud-native applications engineered? In contrast to the increasing popularity of the topic, there are surprisingly few reference applications available. In the previous blogpost we described a first version of a prototypical document management application consisting of composed containers which is called ARKIS Microservices. We elaborated on the challenges involved when designing and developing a cloud-native application. In addition, we showed some details about the architecture and functionalities of version 2.5 of this generic reference application .

In this blogpost, we now dive deeper into the architecture of the latest version 3.3, paying attention to each component. The document management software is a cloud-native application based on a microservices architecture. The software permits multiple tenants to manage their documents (create, read, update, delete and search patterns in documents). It manages the different tenants and offers different isolation models to store the documents of a tenant. Furthermore, the services are discoverable through declarative service descriptions, and their use is billed according to a pay-per-use scheme.

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Cloud-Native Document Management

30. January 2017 / / 4 Comments

by Josef Spillner

Document management is an established software-powered business domain. As with most software applications, an ongoing trend is to move the functionality of document management systems (DMS) and related functionality (Enterprise Content Management – ECM, Content Services – CS) into well-defined services, primarily in cloud environments, resulting in cloud-native document management systems/services (CNDMS).

In the context of the research initiative on cloud-native applications and the ARKIS project within the Service Prototyping Lab, we have been looking deeper into the issues surrounding cloud-native document management and have built a prototype implementation to test-drive any ideas and new concepts. This post introduces the software and the challenges already solved with it. Continue reading

Benchmarking cloud-native database systems

2. September 2016 / / 0 Comments

by Josef Spillner

For reliable, user-controlled and trustworthy file storage in the cloud, free software prototypes like NubiSave have become great tools to investigate and lift the barrier towards acceptable migration paths. For structured data storage and processing, several approaches to database-as-a-service (DBaaS) have been proposed by researchers and developers but a clear recommendation of how to best manage rows or records of data in the cloud from a practicality angle is still absent. Partially, the question about how to do this is due to the different pricing structures and availability guarantees by the providers which are not trivial to compare. Often, running the database system as set of replicated or sharded containers being part of the application appears to be a valid alternative to the binding of existing commercial DBaaS, if done correctly. After all, cloud providers would offer the same technical guarantees for any of their services. An analysis of which configuration works better and is less expensive would thus be needed.

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CNA seed project: CoreOS/Fleet implementation wrap-up

8. February 2016 / / 0 Comments

The cloud-native applications initiative started in 2014 with the aim of providing guidelines, recommendations, tools and best practices to companies and practitioners facing the daunting task of developing from scratch or migrating from legacy code an application optimized to be run in the cloud.

In order to gather practical experience, roughly one year ago the CNA seed project was kicked off, focusing explicitly on the migration of a traditional (LAMP stack) legacy application to a cloud-native architecture. In this post we relate on the results achived until now.

You can follow the progress of the CNA seed project going through the list of related blog posts collected on the initiative page (look for the “Articles” section).

One year has gone by and a small team of great people have worked together to scout, test, design, code, deploy, record, and yell at a little code base that we’re happy to share as open source on our github (https://github.com/icclab/cna-seed-project/).

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Process Management in Docker Containers

9. June 2015 / / 1 Comment

In the context of the Cloud Native Applications (CNA) Seed Project we are working on migrating an open source CRM application into to the cloud. After enabling horizontal scalabilty of the original application and moving it onto our OpenStack cloud with the help of CoreOS (etcd, fleet) and docker we’ve now just finished adding the monitoring / logging / log-collection functionality – a blog post describing this process in its detail will follow – which is needed for the next part of the project: enabling automatic scaling. As part of this process we’ve learnt some lessons concerning the process management in docker containers which we’d like to share in this post.

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Cloud-Native Applications Seed Project: Migration-Process Part 1

13. February 2015 / / 0 Comments

As stated in a previous blog-post, at the beginning of this year we started with the project of migrating the open-source application Zurmo CRM into the cloud. In this first blog-post on the progress of this process we will describe our initial plan, show the basic components of a cloud-optimized application and talk about whether to stick with the monolithic architecture style of Zurmo or migrate it to a microservices architecture. We’ll furthermore discuss the first steps we took in migrating Zurmo to the cloud and how we plan to continue.

TL;DR

  • We use the term cloud-optimized to describe an application which has the same characteristics as a cloud-native applicaton but is the result of a migration process.
  • The basic components of a cloud-optimized application are: Application Core, Enabling Systems, Monitoring- and Management-Systems. All of which have to be scalable and resilient.
  • A monolithic architecture style is best suited for smaller applications (little functionality / low number of developers) resp. when starting to build a new application.
  • A microservices architecture style is best suited for large applications (lots of functionality / high number of developers). Its benefits are less of a technical nature but more of the way it helps to manage the development and deployment of applications.
  • We decided to stick with the monolithic architecture. The first change we did to the application was to horizontally scale the web server with the use of a load balancer and make the application core stateless.

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Cloud-Native Applications: Seed Project Kickoff

28. January 2015 / / 1 Comment

Cloud-Native Applications is a new research initiative which was launched by the ICCLab a couple of months ago. The initial time was used to gather knowledge on this very interesting and broad topic. For a detailed description of the initiative and cloud-native applications in general head to the initiative overview page.

But all the knowledge in the world is not worth much without some actual experience. And therefore as of the beginning of this year we launched the Cloud-Native Applications Seed Project or CNA Seed Project for short. The goal of this project is to take a traditional business application which was not designed to run in the cloud and modify it so that it can be deployed and operated in a cloud-environment.

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