Cluster Packaging for Continuous Integration & Disaster Recovery - Tony Hansmann

Schedule:

5:30-6:30pm Pizza and Networking
6:30-8:00pm Talk and Q&A
8:00-8:30pm Wind down

BOSH: System overview and cluster planning

BOSH (https://github.com/cloudfoundry/... (https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh)) is an OSS framework for defining all elements of a complex cluster into a release. Once a release is built and is combined with a deployment manifest, BOSH will trivially deploy, upgrade and downgrade clusters with dozens of components and hundreds of VMs to any IaaS*.

BOSH aims to solve the “complex clusters are often snowflakes” problem. Even if a cluster works and is easy to run, upgrading/ downgrading and repeatability are a challenge. As a consequence, very few clusters have CI, DR or bug reproduction environments. Because a BOSH deployed cluster is packaged, it can be checked-in and run under CI. It also makes DR trivial (you’ll still need to backup databases and other state information). The talk will
briefly describe the on-the-fly DR Cloud Foundry did when AWS lost an AZ.

BOSH release packaging is similar to 'RPM' and 'dpkg', but covers a much larger surface area. A BOSH release (and deployment) cover cluster creation, component compiling per OS/version, release updating/rollback, failure recovery, basic OS metrics and VM access.

The first part of the talk covers the basic BOSH components required to deploy a cluster: the stemcell, the release and the deployment manifest. The second part covers planning for BOSH in your organization: IaaS requirements, deploying a BOSH director, estimating conversion effort and what kind of productivity boost to expect. There will be time for questions, arrive ready to discuss your cluster!

• Currently there is production support for VMware, AWS, various Openstack distros, and Cloud Foundry Warden. The IaaS interface (called a Cloud Provider Interface - CPI for short) is OSS and can be implemented as a stand-alone server which the BOSH Director can use to control a new IaaS.

About the Speaker:

Tony Hansmann is a developer on the BOSH team at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. He started using BOSH in 2012 as a SRE at VMware. Before that, he worked as a consultant and sometimes staff member for startups building their business on Linux clusters.