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Marc Brooker & Holly Mesrobian from AWS

This looked like a super interesting session as AWS doesn’t often let you peek under the hood of how it runs its infrastructure. Of all the AWS services, Lambda is arguably the most interesting under the hood as the whole point of Lambda is you don’t have to worry about what’s underneath that hood and there’s a big engine!

Running Highly Available Large Scale systems is a lot of work.

• needs load-balancing
• scale up and down
• handling failures

When you use Lambda as part of a serverless platform, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale any servers although the servers are obviously there. As a developer you don’t need to concern yourself with any of the undifferentiated heavy lifting but there’s a very sophisticated architecture underneath to make that abstraction work.

Holly and Marc went through how AWS designed one of its fastest growing services. Lambda processes trillions of requests for customers across the world.

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Tim Bray from AWS

Tim Bray from AWS, very distinguished software engineer, developed XML and JSON!

AWS is happy to sell you some of everything. The AWS console is a vast list of choices, but how do you chose when there are multiple technologies to link together to achieve an outcome, never mind multiple options of the dame thing? Multiple databases, multiple streaming options, multiple instance types. Serverless or containers? Is Java over?

AWS has always maintained it doesn’t have an opinion on which services to chose. When it comes to building AWSs own services, their engineering groups DO have some strong opinions. Tim’s presentation was all about navigating the high-level choices available.

What is a modern application? This was a question which came out of the analyst relations group who wanted guidance on what services to use.

You have 4 ways to modernise apps

1. Lift and Shift:  -> EC2
2. Re-platform: VMs –> containers
3. Refactor: monoliths –> microservices
4. Re-invent: host-fleets -> serverless

Modern applications

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I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Accelerite is a company I surprisingly haven’t heard of before and it is also new to Tech Field Day.

Founded in 2012 it is a wholly owned business of Persistent Systems and is a software house that aims to “Simplify and Secure the Enterprise Infrastructure”. Accelerite says there is a proliferation of devices and clouds that enterprises need to manage and secure.

CloudPlatform

I hadn’t realised that it was Accelerite that bought CloudPlatform from Citrix in March 2016. CloudPlatform was Citrix’s Apache CloudStack based platform, an open source cloud management platform and was at a time a possible alternative to OpenStack. It didn’t seem to get much traction in terms of numbers although tere are some massive deployments and it was seen as more enterprise ready. OpenStack seemed to get the buzz and won the marketing battle but has itself struggled with adoption due to complexity & feature bloat. Cries of OpenStack is dead are overblown, it is used in very large telcos and service providers, is being simplified and streamlined and will possible then creep back into enterprises who want an open source private linux of the cloud. AWS and Azure have of course been courting the same enterprises with their public cloud offerings. It remains to be seen how much time and effort enterprises are going to expend to what end to create what at least Wikibon is terming the True Private Cloud when public cloud is very tantalising and growing in features way above IaaS.

Accelerite’s CloudPlatform has multi-hypervisor support with its own hypervisor or you can choose from VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, KVM, or Hyper-V. There is bare metal provisioning as well with a particular use case highlighted of high performance computing applications. It can use traditional storage or hyper-converged.

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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.