PaaS Infrastructure With VMware’s Cloud Foundry

PaaS Infrastructure With VMware’s Cloud Foundry

Customer Problem

Many new web-scale software products are being written to PaaS platforms so that developers can simply worry about their code and data while safely ignoring the details of underlying operating systems and virtual machines. VMware Cloud Foundry is a new and increasingly popular open source PaaS implementation that delivers an efficient way to develop and run applications getting them up quickly, providing application HA, auto-scaling and multi-tenancy support inside the application. However, for Cloud Foundry to be deployed as a production PaaS, it needs a scalable, elastic and reliable multi-tenant infrastructure that can keep up with its demands as the number of end users grows over time.

Joint Solution Overview

Cloud Foundry deployments can be run in one or more instances on a Nimbula Director cloud. Today, Nimbula Director provides mechanisms for each tenant of the cloud to run its own Cloud Foundry deployment so that the developers and users of the Cloud Foundry applications from each tenant have complete network, security and resource isolation from the developers and users of other tenants. Furthermore, as demonstrated in a prototype at VMworld Europe in October 2011, Nimbula will be releasing additional functionality that delivers HA, auto-scaling, auto-discovery and auto-configuration for Cloud Foundry deployments on Nimbula Director clouds.

Key functionality:

Multi-tenancy

Running Cloud Foundry on Nimbula Director, PaaS deployments from multiple tenants can be run in a shared cloud with complete isolation from each other. The PaaS applications and end-users for one tenant will be completely isolated from each other in terms of identity, network access and resource contention.

HA for Cloud Foundry

Nimbula Director’s Virtual Services will detect when a Cloud Foundry instance is lost and will restart that instance automatically, auto-configuring it to take on the role or roles (e.g. Droplet Execution Agent, MongoDB, Redis) of the lost instance.

Auto-scaling Cloud Foundry

Nimbula Director’s Virtual Services will detect when the pool of available Droplet Execution Agents (DEAs) are fully occupied, and automatically start new virtual machines to expand the pool of DEAs. Previously this was an entirely manual operation left up to the PaaS operator.

Auto-discovery and auto-configuration for Cloud Foundry:

When a new Cloud Foundry instance is brought up by Nimbula Director, either in response to an HA event or an auto-scaling operation, the Virtual Services framework will automatically discover the target Cloud Foundry deployment, and auto-configure the new instance to take its place in that deployment. Previously, this would have been a manual task for each new instance.

Links

• VMware Cloud Foundry website
• Sign me up to get updates on the integration of Nimbula and Cloud Foundry
• Download PaaS Infrastructure with VMware’s Cloud Foundry