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Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day –1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 0 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 2 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 3 Buzz

Session was led by Chris Crafford, a Practice Manager, VMware

This again was a high level overview of the technologies available and went through what microservice are, the 12 factor apps I mentioned in the lab I did and why they are better for cloud environments. Microservices only manage the data they care about, are accessed only via the service, there are no shared libraries.

Chris mentioned an interesting thing I hadn’t thought of for the definition. Microservices need to be automatically deployed to make them true microservices, its not good enough to just have services that are micro.

Chris went through one of the major tenets of microservices which is all about failure management, assume failure and have an architecture that mitigates the impact of the faults, errors and failures at runtime.

Then Chris went on to talk about migrating legacy applications which must be done as an evolutionary approach. Choose the most business urgent to break out first. Use containers for this new bit and leverage best practices for CI/CD, automating all the steps. Learn and improve and then repeat for the next service that has been prioritised.

Another thing Chris mentioned was some deployments use one microservice per container but this makes management more challenging so consider a business role mapped to a container model instead.

The short session ended with a vCloud Air commercial, VMware funnily enough says it is the ideal target for migration of legacy applications particularly with the recent announcements with layer 2 networking between your data center and vCloud Air and container security with NSX.

The future of vCloud Air and how it will integrate with EMCs recent aquisition of Virtustream now becomes very interesting as vCloud Air is being moved out of VMware direct management and folded directly into Virtustream. Who knows what the future holds.

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day –1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 0 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 1 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 2 Buzz
• VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 3 Buzz

“DevOps, Containers, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Microservices, 12-factor applications, 3rd platform, oh my!” is how it is described.

The VMware Hands-on-Labs are available online from http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ and the VMworld specific ones are available from: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/vmworld. It doesn’t seem the VMworld labs are available yet post show and this lab isn’t available with the main ones so hopefully this will appear soon.

This was a big ‘ol lab with plenty of content. Labs are in 90 minute slots which you can extend by 20 minutes and topics may not be finished in time so you may need another session to complete.

All the seats were full when I arrived but I was able to use my own laptop and just connect over the internet to do the lab, I could have done it from anywhere in the world. Kudos to the lab team, they’ve done a great job, the layout was great, no delays or any connectivity issues.

This lab went through a fair amount of background information on what microservices are (splitting apart monolithic applications into many more nimble parts) and listed the 12 factors that ideally make up a cloud native applications. You can read more about them at http://12factor.net/ and in plain English http://www.clearlytech.com/2014/01/04/12-factor-apps-plain-english/

The lab then went through an explanation of containers, Docker (company that does containers) and Kubernetes (container orchestrations)

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