Cloud Foundry Summit North America 2019

Blue-green deployment is a technique that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called Blue and Green.

At any time, only one of the environments is live, with the live environment serving all production traffic. Traditionally, the decision to switch from Blue to the Green environment has been by doing some basic manual tests in the (new) Green environment and mapping and unmapping routes from the new and old environments.

Spinnaker (www.spinnaker.io) is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

Spinnaker can be used for automated Canary analysis. Canary is a deployment process in which a change is partially rolled out, then evaluated against the current deployment (baseline) to ensure that the new deployment is operating at least as well as the old. This evaluation is done using key metrics that are chosen when the canary is configured.

In this talk, we will present to you on:
1. What integrations exists in Spinnaker for Cloud Foundry and how to set it up.
2. Why is Blue Green Deployments with Spinnaker better for Cloud Foundry applications?
3. How to do Blue Green deployments on Cloud Foundry using Spinnaker.
4. Configure a pipeline and metrics for Canary analysis
5. End to end demo of configuring a pipeline and how it all works together on Cloud Foundry

The intention of this talk is to show a live step-by-step approach to migrate a monolithic WebSphere application to Cloud Foundry. It starts showing the application running in it’s WebSphere environments and finishes running the migrated app on Cloud Foundry. On the migration journey the following steps are shown:

* Deployment and runtime on WebSphere
* Analysis of application in terms of required code changes and connected backend services
* Configuration and bring up of the application on WebSphere Liberty Profile
* Deployment and runtime on PCF Dev using Community Buildpack for Liberty
* Migration of backend services to Cloud Platform (Microsoft Azure in this example)
* Deployment and runtime of application on PCF on Azure
* Application of strangler pattern to start slicing the monolith into Microservices.

It is based on a talk given at the User track of Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel 2018. It was received very well, got a lot of good feedback and brought up interesting discussions with the attendees. While this talk was very conceptual, this new version is intended to demonstrate the involved steps in a live example and perform the migration within the given time of 30 minutes.

"Great job on getting all patches applied!" – said no CIO ever...

As the transition to micro-service architecture has accelerated service delivery at Comcast - security, audit, and compliance added friction and hasn't felt the same love. This inspired us to think about how we can change the approach to security, versus just doing the same things only harder.

When at Comcast we hosted a live demo session showing the possibility of transforming security to raise safety to a new level by going faster with significantly less effort, we had a lot of interested developers registered to attend. What if we could use many of the current methodologies and practices just in a slightly different way to make our products secure by default while removing undifferentiated heavy lifting? What if we could implement the Cloud Native Security principals across the entire SDLC?

In this session, you’ll learn about practical steps and implementations that help to accelerate application development lifecycle while, at the same time, strengthen security of the applications. Some of the steps include integration of Cloud Native platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes with secret management systems to offload DevOps teams from handling passwords and to enable password-free service delivery.

Comcast manages over 2 million miles of fiber and coax, and over 40 million in home devices. This “outside plant” is subject to adverse conditions from severe weather to power grid outages to construction-related disruptions. Maintaining the health of this large and important infrastructure requires a distributed, scalable, reliable and fast information system capable of real-time processing and rapid analysis and response. Using Cloud Foundry, Comcast is able to deploy a Java Spring Kafka Streams application for monitoring, problem analysis, metrics reporting and action response for the outside plant.

In this talk, you’ll learn how to create and deploy a Cloud Foundry Kafka Streams application. You will see how to scale the application using partitioning and how to maintain high speed, durable instance-based state. You'll see how easy it is to connect several of these applications (or micro services) together using asynchronous messaging. You will see how to build a REST API using Kafka Streams “interactive queries” that can be used to retrieve the data in the state stores. We will explore the deployment and monitoring mechanisms used to deliver this system as a set of independently deployed components.

On a superficial level, when looking at Knative, the function / service platform on top of Kubernetes, you might believe that this is a new version of Cloud Foundry but written using Kubernetes as a backend.

Indeed, using a Knative CLI like Knctl, you can deploy your application from source with `$knctl deploy my-app ...` which is pretty close to `$cf push my-app ...`. But are the similarities skin deep? Where do they differ? And where do they overlap?

In this talk, I will compare and contrast the latest experiences of Cloud Foundry and Knative in order to extract meaningful comparison of their features from a developer perspective. Additionally, I will measure and compare key metrics that affect the developer experience, e.g., time to deploy, time to scale, and other such metrics. Finally, I will also compare and contrast the two platforms on features, e.g., RBAC, plug-ability, scalability, and some performance metrics.

The overall goal is to better understand how these two platforms are going especially as CF is looking to work on top of Kubernetes and therefore have the same backend.

Tolstoy has a famous quote in his novel, Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In this presentation, Dr. Gao is going to show you, as “Happy Apps are all alike; every unhappy App is unhappy in its own way.” More importantly, she will present the common issues encountered when you push and run your apps, as well as share the experiences that her team has acquired over years of debugging applications on CF. In addition to discussing the specific tools and methods her team uses, she will also share the philosophy of effective debugging.

Then, following the spirit of this philosophy, you will be able to handle debugging any application, even if the error is the dreaded ‘Unknown Error.’ This will enable you to avoid many issues before they negatively impact your business.

Shift-Left, Shift-Right, *-As-Code, and Self-Healing are some of the latest buzzwords when it comes to building and deploying cloud-native architectures. In this session Mike Villiger will bring these buzzwords to life.

Mike will cover how the Shifting-Right of build, deployment, and environment metadata and the Shifting-Left of deep performance information enables faster release cycles. Attendees will also learn how a common source of metrics across the tool chain can enable actionable feedback loops across all team members regardless of the hat they may be wearing on any given day. Mike will live-demo an End-to-End Continuous Delivery Pipeline with automated metrics-based quality gates between pre-production stages, an automatic post production deployment approval step as well as how self-healing (auto-remediation) can really work, with specifications all defined in source control.

While this example unbreakable pipeline was built using Concourse, Cloud Foundry, and Dynatrace, the concepts behind this implementation apply to all other CI/CD Tool Chains (Jenkins, XL Release, etc.)

In this talk, we will introduce the first major open-source APM, Elastic APM, and discuss its capabilities of end-to-end monitoring: Real User Monitoring, Application-level monitoring, Cloud Foundry platform monitoring and other logging/metrics. An application composed of interconnected, autonomous microservices will be used to demonstrate latency tracking, root cause analysis and anomaly detection.

While traditional APM tools let you monitor the application performance metrics of their microservices running in Cloud Foundry, Elastic APM allows you to cross reference and correlate the platform logs and metrics to get a holistic view of your systems or business. This consolidated view of your systems lets you spot, debug and fix issues quicker.

One of the first things you notice when developing with Cloud Foundry is the time it takes to deploy a multi-node application and how that delay impacts productivity. This is one of the trade-offs we incur in order to gain all the benefits of a micro-services environment. However while much of this unavoidable, there are tips and tricks that can be employed to shorten your round-trip time considerably.

In this talk, Andrew will give an explanation of the root cause of this issue and what can be done to address it including localizing your development environment, piecemeal deployments, and editing/testing after deploy. He will also demonstrate how set up full step-trace debugging of a python application running in Cloud Foundry and how to generalize this approach to other programming languages.

The integration of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes was one of the major topics during the Cloud Foundry Summits 2018 in Boston and Basel. Earlier panel discussions there created quite some interest: “Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes - Will it blend?” (http://sched.co/DdZr, https://youtu.be/4ow7IumxkOM) and "Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes - Did it blend?" (https://sched.co/FRyD, https://youtu.be/QkQe3354Y6Q)

In a sequel to these panel discussions, representatives of major companies in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem will reconvene to assess the status of an integration between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, the progress that has been made since the CF Summits Boston and Basel, and provide updates to the visions these companies have for a future of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.

Cloud Foundry simplifies the “lift & shift” model of cloud migration, making it easy for developers to secure applications before or after migration. By using a suite of free tools, developers can create and deploy self-defending applications to Cloud Foundry that open up security expertise like any other cloud resource: available on-demand without human intervention, scaling to any size.
We will cover security differences of on-premise and cloud deployments, and the risk of unsecured cloud deployments. We will then use free tools to analyze applications as they are built and run, matching everything between development, testing, and the cloud.