Programming frameworks, containers, and application platforms are some of the components that make up the modern application architecture. Chip Childers of Cloud Foundry Foundation spoke at ApacheCon Conference last week about modern application architectures and the cloud native application platform.
He talked about combining the cloud native applications with the continuous delivery of business value for development teams to be agile in both software development processes as well as the production deployments. Technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Docker, and Mesos are the building blocks helping organizations realize the continuous innovation goals.
Chip talked about the enterprises using open stack frameworks in all layers of the application architecture, which include the following:
- Programming Frameworks
- Containers
- Application Platforms
- Operating Systems
- Virtual Machines
- Datacenter Operating Systems
- Datacenter Networking
- Carrier Networking
- Hardware
Microservices are also a big part of the new application architecture model. Emergent requirements for microservices are rapid provisioning, monitoring, rapid application deployment and the DevOps culture.
Technologies that are building toward this architecture include container platforms (Docker, Rocket), automation tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef), and data center scale cluster management frameworks (Mesos, Kubernetes).
He talked about the technology stack of Cloud Foundry project which includes the elastic runtime environment called Diego, where the applications and persistent state services needed for the applications live. He also discussed the Lattice project that can run on a laptop or deployed to Amazon cloud to create the elastic run time clusters.
Chip concluded the presentation with the vision of cloud computing space that is ubiquitous and flexible and supports public, private, and hybrid deployment of applications. It's also portable and interoperable enabling users to move their applications wherever they need to go.
InfoQ caught up with Chip to learn more about the Cloud Foundry Foundation and technologies used in the cloud application platform.
InfoQ: What is Cloud Foundry Foundation?
Childers: Cloud Foundry Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)6 independent open source organization established to drive long-term growth and health of Cloud Foundry. As the leading open source cloud native application platform, Cloud Foundry makes building, testing, deploying, operating and scaling applications faster and easier while supporting an open ecosystem of software development frameworks and data services. The foundation is made up of over 40 companies spanning technology vendors, cloud service providers and end user organizations.
InfoQ: What should developers consider when developing applications to run with container technologies like Docker?
Childers: Generally, we believe that the 12-factor application architecture is the best description of what needs to be considered in modern application design. The twelve factors embody a set of principles that have been battle tested in early adopters of cloud platforms.
The best description of Docker containers that I've heard recently is "Docker is the artifact currency of the container age". Containers have become a powerful tool within the application delivery pipelines of the modern enterprise. Understanding how to move code from a developer's laptop, through the CI/CD chain, and into production is really the key.
InfoQ: Can you discuss what is a cloud native application platform?
Childers: A cloud native application platform, like Cloud Foundry, is a platform that gives developers and operations teams the right set of capabilities and services to deliver modern 12-factor applications quickly. It embodies and automates the operational practices necessary for a clean separation between "platform operations" and "application operations", while providing both users with a clean set of interfaces. Last, it makes day two operations a first class priority of its design.