Track: Architecture Case Studies: Cloud

Abstract: Developing and deploying applications in the cloud should be easy. It should just work, and work well. DevOps don't want to worry about things such as virtual machines, kernels, and packages, they want to worry about their applications and services. PaaS, or  aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) tries to deliver on that goal. But how does one develop a system that is architected for the largest datacenters, but can also run simply on your laptop or in a single downloadable VM? Something that will be run as a service, and distributed as a standalone product as well? We will discuss how Cloud Foundry was architected as a simple, yet scalable, and flexible distributed system that can be run on your laptop, on vSphere, Amazon Web Services, and anywhere in between.

In this session we will dig deep into Cloud Foundry's core architecture and design principles. We will discuss the challenges around scaling and operating a large scale service as we combined the PaaS and traditional IaaS layers, and how we achieve multiple updates per week to the system with no perceived downtime. Allowing user to  download a single virtual machine that is a complete replica of the service presented some challenges as well, and we will discuss our approach to offering up the downloadable private cloud.