Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Pivotal provided in November, 2013 the corporate Cloud Foundary distribution kit — a cross-cloud solution for the companies which aim to move workloads to cloud infrastructures. Pivotal CF is urged to provide an opportunity to start software in a private cloud and to be connected to different services. The purpose of the company, according to the ambitious statement of heads — to create a cross-cloud platform for applied use^[1].

It is obvious that those who wish to cover the maximum audience should offer the applications working in all widespread cloud services. And neither OpenStack, nor AWS, nor VMware are going to hand over positions. The Pivotal platform, providing portability between clouds, applies for the solution of a global problem.

The company started Pivotal One — the open source solution working on the 'platform as service' model, including a useful set of services and applications and based on the Cloud Foundary platform. From now on any company will be able to start Cloud Foundary, having selected a cloud at own will — for example, vSphere, AWS or OpenStack. It will allow it to open quicker for customers access to the innovations through public and private cloud services, it is easy to scale and update the applications.

The packet of Pivotal One services includes Pivotal HD — the adapted corporate version of Apache Hadoop, tools of the automated analytics of Pivotal AX and a message exchange system open source of RabbitMQ.

Platform cloud

For June 15, 2015 Pivotal CF is the platform for the cloud systems operating as a certain layer of abstraction for virtual environment ("virtualization for virtualization").

Task - in creation of the unified platform on which it is possible to start any applications without binding to a specific cloud or a hypervisor. So as the construction block serves not the virtual machine, but^[2] container^[2].

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is model of providing cloud computing at which the consumer gets access to use of information technology platforms: operating systems, database management systems, to the middleware, development tools and testings placed with cloud provider.

Pivotal suggests to come to any cloud provider with own cloud platform which is put over all popular IaaS. The purpose is simple: the customer can decide - to work with Amazon, not with VMware. Or the solution distributed on the world will be required, and services of cloud providers in the different countries differ according to the platform or the price for it.

Containers of applications

Containers on prospects are comparable with cloud computing and leaders of the industry put significant forces to bring closer the idea to the market.

Basic element of a container - Application Instance — the application or its part, the fundamental construction unit when scaling. Each container can consist of one and more Application Instance (AI), together forming the final application. Requests to all are distributed by AI in a container.

Containers — means of logical isolation of applications from each other with powerful opportunities of abstraction from the execution environment is simple. In a container the operating system and all necessary resources becomes virtualized. Each program at the same time considers that it works on own server with exclusively selected capacities. And taking into account start of a set of Application Instance in one container, density and flexibility when scaling impressive.

Use of container model with a set of Application Instance gives advantages:

• An opportunity to abstract from differences of the different server systems of a cloud. Instead of measurement of number of processors and amount of memory it is possible to estimate TCO standard Application Instance.

• AI becomes the unified element of scaling of any applications that reduces overheads and does not limit business growth.

• Utilization of the equipment at the expense of the bigger density of container applications increases.

Architecture of Pivotal CF

Pivotal treats platform clouds which are based on virtual machines. after loading of the .OVA-file and deployment of VM from it for vSphere the packet already contains services, necessary for Cloud Foundry.

Architecture of Pivotal CF, 2014

Architecturally Pivotal CF is under construction of so-called "microservices", each of which executes a limited role:

• databases;
• big data;
• message exchange system;
• mobile services;
• other that can be required to the specific application, is added modularly.

Programs are placed in the isolated containers with all necessary for work. The format of a container gives the amplest opportunities of distribution. The user should not deal with installation, adding of necessary components and drivers. Instead he imports a new container to a cloud and will receive the ready-made solution.

All infrastructure of Pivotal is controlled on a centralized basis, including applications and microservices. Microservices are approach to creation of architecture at which each distributed application is created from a set of smaller "cubes" which are responsible for the narrow circle of tasks.

For example:

• system of collecting of logs and magazines of performance;
• instrument of scaling;
• service utilities for work with a cloud;
• monitoring system and the pro-active notification about problems.

Communications between microservices and applications happen to the help of the simplest protocols like http API. As each microservice can separately be developed and updated, adding of business functions of the application becomes simpler. Except simplicity of development, the microservice architecture considerably simplifies scaling. Instead of installation and setup of new servers and OS it is necessary just to add "cubes" and to connect them to one logical application in a container.

Service components are available in the form of the uniform web console. CF works with three main cloud systems: VMware, OpenStack and AWS. Such flexibility allows to implement the platform in a wide range of the companies — just that option when the rate on market leaders of clouds and virtualization is repaid in the long term.

Main requirements to VMware vSphere infrastructure

• vSphere ESXi 0, 5.1, 5.5;
• vCD 1, 5.2, 5.6;
• edition is not lower than Standard;
• if vSphere DRS is included, then Automation level needs to be exposed on Partially automated or Fully automated;
• Pivotal CF Ops Manager requires RW access to all hierarchy of vCenter at the level of data center.

Applicability and perspectives

As a part of the solution all usual services of monitoring, configuration, application-servers and other. Only in a case with a cloud all this is delivered "turnkey" and does not require separate efforts on setup and support.

Any application in the Application Instance format will receive at once:

• Condition monitoring and operability of the application.
• Balancing of loading.
• Performance management of the application.
• The centralized collecting of logs and audit.
• Management of network politicians of access and the simplified access to databases (format of microservices).

Developers have a start opportunity on one platform of any combination of applications on Java, Spring, Ruby Node.js, PHP, Python, Go. Once the configured platform cloud allows to start and extend software without binding to the compiler and the environment of execution. Pivotal CF saves the developer from need of the organization of stands and recompilation of applications under different platforms.

Notes