Im Sommer 2017 lancierte Amazee.io ein neues Produkt: Lagoon. Die Open Source Drupal Hosting Plattform nimmt den Programmcode von Entwicklern, bildet damit Docker Images, überträgt diese in OpenShift/Kubernetes und überwacht gleichzeitig die Deployments. Dieser gesamte Prozess läuft auf APPUiO. „Der Entscheid für APPUiO kam nicht von ungefähr: Mit den Initianten der Container Plattform verbindet uns eine jahrelange professionelle Zusammenarbeit im Betrieb“, so Bastian Widmer, System Engineer bei Amazee.io. Zudem teile man die selben Werte und setze konsequent auf OpenSource. “Der gesamte Sourcecode von Lagoon ist als Opensource Projekt veröffentlicht”, erklärt Widmer. Bereits in der Betaphase wurden die ersten Projekte auf APPUiO umgesetzt. Schnell wurde die Zusammenarbeit ausgebaut. „Lagoon ist gemeinsam mit APPUiO gewachsen“, so Widmer.

Die Vorteile von APPUiO sieht der Systemtechniker in der Unterstützung, OpenShift zu verstehen. Um OpenShift unabhängig zu betreiben, bräuchte man viel Wissen und müsste sich stetig auf dem Laufenden halten. “Im Rahmen von Managed Private APPUiO wird uns dies abgenommen. Denn Updates und der Betrieb werden automatisch von den Experten durchgeführt”, erklärt Widmer.

Die Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Partnern erfolgt meistens in Projekten. „Wir sehen uns dabei als Experten für das Drupal-Hosting, APPUiO ist der Spezialist in Sachen OpenShift.“ Die Leistungen von APPUiO reichen von der Beratung über den Aufbau bis hin zum Betrieb. „Regelmässig führen wir gemeinsame Stand-ups durch“, so Widmer. In naher Zukunft will Amazee.io mit Lagoon zusätzliche Länder erschliessen – mit APPUiO als starkem OpenShift-Partner an seiner Seite.

www.amazee.io

Unflexibilität, hohe Koordination und technische Herausforderungen: „2016 merkten wir, dass die Konfiguration von mehreren Applikationen in der damaligen Umgebung sehr komplex war“, erklärt Matthias Summer, Senior System Engineer bei Adcubum. Nach intensiver Recherche nach Lösungen stand fest: „Wir wollen OpenShift von Red Hat nutzen“. Mit APPUiO habe man sogar einen Partner gefunden, der noch viel mehr bietet. „Erfahrene Experten, die sich tagtäglich mit OpenShift auseinandersetzen, haben die Plattform hier bei uns im Haus aufgebaut und uns geschult”, so Summer. Gemeinsam mit seinem Team von insgesamt fünf System Engineers betreibt Summer rund 500 Testinstallationen von adcubum SYRIUS. „Dank APPUiO können wir nun auf Knopfdruck Testumgebungen deployen“, sagt Summer.

Bis Ende 2018 möchte Adcubum 95 Prozent der Entwicklungs- und Testinstanzen auf OpenShift zum Laufen bringen. Die Herausforderung liegt dabei darin, eine 20 Jahre alte Applikation mit mehreren Millionen Zeilen Code für die neue Container Plattform aufzubereiten. Obwohl der Aufwand gross ist, sieht Summer nur Vorteile: „Da wir in Zukunft auf einer einzigen Plattform arbeiten, verbessert sich die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Entwicklung und Betrieb massiv. Zudem werden wir effizienter.“ Profitieren können auch die Kunden wie beispielsweise Helsana, Concordia, Visana und SUVA. Sie könnten zukünftig (frühestens ab 2019) adcubum SYRIUS auch in Form von Containern erhalten und diese auf ihrer eigenen OpenShift Installation betreiben. “Die Entwicklungsplattform der Kunden ist dann identisch mit unserer. Dadurch können Updates automatisch und viel häufiger durchgeführt werden”, erklärt Summer.

Seit Ende 2017 läuft adcubum SYRIUS auf der OpenShift Container Plattform APPUiO. „Nun möchten wir auch unsere Kunden von OpenShift begeistern“. Dabei setzt Adcubum auf die enge Partnerschaft mit APPUiO.

www.adcubum.com

Bereits zum dritten Mal traf sich Anfang März die Entwickler-Community an den Voxxed Days in Zürich. Spannende Talks zu Themengebieten wie Java, Big Data, Cloud oder Serverless standen auf dem Programm. Für uns vom APPUiO-Team stand der Austausch mit den Entwicklern im Vordergrund.

Ebenfalls spannend waren für uns folgende Expertentalks:

Real world serverless - architecture, patterns and lessons learned: Lessons learned wie eine Applikation mit AWS Lamba betrieben werden kann.

Troubleshooting & Debugging Production Applications in Kubernetes: Einblick in ein Toolset um debugging aufs nächste Level zu bringen.

One does not simply log in! - SSO for Web APIs: Keycloak, OAuth2, OpenID Connect und JSON Web Tokens (JWT) waren hier das Thema.

Introduction to Apache Kafka as Event-Driven Open Source Streaming Platform: Einführung in Apache Kafka.

Alle Talks der Voxxed Days können auf YouTube nachgeschaut werden: YouTube playlist

Nächstes Jahr finden die Voxxed Days am 21. März 2019 wiederum im Sihlcity Cinema in Zürich statt. Wir freuen uns darauf!

„Durch die Containertechnologie ist es möglich, nahezu jede Applikation auf APPUiO zu deployen. Die grösste Einschränkung war bis jetzt, dass der Zugriff vom Internet aus nur über HTTP oder HTTPS möglich war. Das ist ab sofort anders! Wir unterstützen neu den Zugriff vom Internet via TCP oder UDP auf jede Art von Applikation, die auf APPUiO läuft.“

Und so funktioniert es

Da sich Services im Moment noch nicht über das OpenShift Webinterface erstellen lassen, muss dies über den Command Line Client oc gemacht werden. Dies ist aber ganz einfach:

1. Anmelden an APPUiO

oc login console.appuio.ch

2. Service erstellen (Beispiel mit TCP)

oc -n MYPROJECT create service loadbalancer mytcpservice --tcp=587:587

Hinweis: Dieser so erstellte Service selektiert automatisch alle Pods mit dem Label app=mytcpservice

3. Zugewiesene externe IP Adresse abrufen

oc -n MYPROJECT describe service mytcpservice

Die IP Adresse findet man im Feld "External IPs".

Nun ist der Service, der in den vom Service selektierten Pods läuft, über die automatisch zugewiesene externe IP-Adresse und dem definierten Port erreichbar.

Die offizielle Dokumentation zu diesem Feature ist unter docs.appuio.ch zu finden. Ein solcher Service mit einer öffentlichen IP-Adresse kostet CHF 0.35 pro Tag. Bei Fragen stehen wir jederzeit unter support@appuio.ch zur Verfügung. Wir helfen auch gerne bei der Implementation Ihres Services auf APPUiO.

APPUiO allows you to orchestrate and manage containers with Kubernetes. You define how many of your application instances should run in parallel and Kubernetes then takes care of scaling, load balancing and stability.

The concept of Kubernetes is described in the ebook „The state of the Kubernetes Ecosystem“. It serves as a primer for both newcomers, assessors and implementers who are looking to make the most of the ecosystem of products and services emerging around Kubernetes.

We are proud to be mentioned with APPUiO among big international brands in this ebook. It motivates to go on working with Kubernetes and bring each day more services to the cloud.

You can get the ebook here.

The world is talking about the Kubernetes Project - but did you hear about OpenShift? It’s an open source product based on the open source projects Kubernetes and Docker plus a container builder/registry, and a Web GUI to manage it all. This blog post will introduce you to OpenShift and give some hints why to use it, how to get started, and where you can get professional support and managed services.

What is OpenShift and why should you use it?

It describes itself as “the industry’s most secure and comprehensive enterprise-grade container platform based on industry standards, Docker and Kubernetes”. It’s much more than that - it gives you a complete Kubernetes cluster with many cool features: integrated build pipelines, Docker Registry, Application router (for getting traffic into the cluster), security based on RBAC and SELinux, Web Console for easy access, central logging of all Pod output, Metrics to measure Pod performance, Installation and upgrade using Ansible Playbooks, Source-to-Image builds, and much much more.

As a Linux distribution acts to the Linux Kernel, OpenShift is a Kubernetes distribution with all the needed tools and tricks to make full use of it.

OpenShift comes in two flavors:

• OpenShift Container Platform: Software product to install in your data center and get support by Red Hat.
• OpenShift Origin: The open source upstream project with a very active GitHub repository.

OpenShift enables you to develop faster - after committing your changes in GIT it solves container image build, storage, deploy, scaling, monitoring, and logging for you so you don’t have to do it. The integrated build and deployment processes help you get the developed application to the customer as fast as possible. It enables you to deploy hourly or even faster, and scale computing resources per project automatically with your user base.

How to get started?

There are many many ways to get started, here are a few hints and examples:

• Install your own OpenShift cluster for example on Exoscale with the official Ansible Playbooks. By using these playbooks you learn to customize every inch of the installation and configuration, and they also help you upgrade from one version to another. Documentation about these playbooks can be found inside the Git repository or on the documentation page.
• Start a local OpenShift cluster on your workstation with Minishift (based on Minikube) or with the fancy command oc cluster up. Just download the client binary from the GitHub releases page, unpack it, and then run the oc cluster up command. This will launch a complete OpenShift instance on your local Docker Engine:

% oc cluster up
Starting OpenShift using openshift/origin:v3.6.0 ...
Pulling image openshift/origin:v3.6.0
Pulled 1/4 layers, 28% complete
Pulled 2/4 layers, 83% complete
Pulled 3/4 layers, 88% complete
Pulled 4/4 layers, 100% complete
Extracting
Image pull complete
OpenShift server started.

The server is accessible via web console at:
    https://127.0.0.1:8443

You are logged in as:
    User: developer
    Password: <any value>

To login as administrator:
    oc login -u system:admin
% oc new-app https://github.com/appuio/example-php-sti-helloworld.git
[...]
% oc expose svc example-php-sti-helloworld
[...]
% curl -s http://example-php-sti-helloworld-myproject.127.0.0.1.nip.io/ | grep title
    

• Have a look at the APPUiO Techlabs on GitHub which is a free step-by-step introduction to get started. We offer free half-day workshops.
• The APPUiO Microservices Example documentation gives some insight for developers on how a Microservice application can be built and deployed on OpenShift, describing tools like Gitlab CI and Jenkins for the build pipelines.

There is a lot of documentation available from upstream. It’s a great source to read about every little detail. You’ll find documentation for both the OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Origin. APPUiO also provides a community-driven documentation.

This blog post was originally published on the Exoscale blog.

It has been a year since my first retrospection onto an APPUiO & OpenShift Techlab; a year and fourteen additional techlabs. And as it's common in such a long time, a lot of things have changed: OpenShift has meanwhile graduated to version 3.5 and its webinterface, compared to version 3.1 back then, has become a lot more powerful and intuitive. But then there are things that remained constant as well, not least among them the lively interest in our Techlabs.

When we updated OpenShift to version 3.4 a lot of things changed for APPUiO. Due to the more intuitive webinterface many operations are now accomplishable by the click of a mouse. This helps new developers to get acquainted. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that there still are quite a few challenges for starting with APPUiO, as demonstrated by the sheer number of participants and the unbroken interest in our Techlabs in both Berne and Zurich. Developers are still participating in large numbers and learning the most important steps to deploying applications into the cloud hands-on.

Other things have stayed tried-and-true, among them the basic concepts of containers. But also my happiness seeing participants getting excited about the technical possibilities they’re offered by OpenShift. And then there are some matters that keep coming up during the Techlabs. One of the questions raised most often is how to to deploy your specifically coded applications onto OpenShift. There are three fundamental ways to do that:

• OpenShift compiles the application-pod from the pure source-code, using the integrated Source-to-Image-Framework. During this process, it automatically identifies the language in question.
• OpenShift builds the application-pod using a provided Docker-file. To do that, the Docker image is built, pushed into the internal registry and finally deployed.
• OpenShift simply uses a pre-built Docker image and deploys it. (see also: reference architecture)

Example of a specifically built S2I-Deployment, including the preceding build in Jenkins. The more frugal way is of course to use an already existing S2I script.

Another question posed often is for just how long our labs are available after the lab. The answer to that one is simple: For as long as you need them. Our labs are downloadable from GitHub and one of our additional labs describes in-depth how to establish your own OpenShift application development environment. This should remove all obstacles to give it a try at home or at work. And of course, in true Open-Source-fashion we’re glad to receive contributions and issues in order to keep improving our Techlabs.

Piqued your interest? The next Techlabs will take place in August and September. We’re looking forward to many participants and are excited for new, informative experiences.

Key Data Techlabs:

APPUiO & OpenShift Techlab Berne:
When: Thursday, August 24th, 14:00 (lasting until ca. 17:30)
Where: Belpstrasse 37, 3007 Bern, 3rd storey (or 4th floor for our American friends)
Registration

APPUiO & OpenShift Techlab Zurich:
When: Thursday, September 28th, 14:00 (lasting until ca. 17:30)
Where: Neugasse 10, 8005 Zurich
Registration

Faster, more accurate and more secure: As of late the software company Abacus Research AG relies on the Swiss container platform “APPUiO”. In the short span of a few months a total of ten applications were moved to the cloud – that’s three times as many as would have been possible using existing traditional processes within the same period.

For their new, innovative and mobile applications Swiss software company Abacus Research AG opted for a new business process: Starting this year the applications are realised from the onset on a container-based platform in the cloud. “That way we disencumber internal IT staff and enable application developers to concentrate on their core business” says Freddy Kaiser, Head of Architecture & Engineering at Abacus Research AG.

Transitioning into the cloud has been on the agenda for a while at Abacus. “Last year we finally had to decide whether to build our own internal solution or to outsource operations completely”, Kaiser says. Given the restricted time frame Abacus decided to go for the second option and have the Swiss container platform “APPUiO” build them their own private cloud. “In APPUiO we found a competent and helpful partner who both suits us and full-fills our demanding requirements”, Kaiser adds. Owing to their work with especially sensitive data it had always been clear for Abacus that only a Swiss cloud service provider operating servers located in Switzerland was to be considered in the first place. With Exoscale a suitable infrastructure provider has been found.

Following evaluation and erection of the cloud in the fall of 2016, AbaNinja was the first application to be deployed onto it in December. “We were happy to see everything worked just fine out of the box and therefore more applications were added very quickly”, Kaiser says. Today a solid ten applications are operated in the cloud. Thanks to the container-based deployment processes have become faster, more exact and last but not least easier to handle. And traceability was considerably improved, too. From coding via test-systems to final deployment all steps have been automated. “We have become three times as efficient in this regard”, Kaiser emphasises.

In this training, you will build a fully functional E-Commerce application, using microservices, Weave Net and Scope, Docker containers and as an orchestrator APPUiO's Red Hat OpenShift v3 based PaaS.

This training is an ideal addition to the free half-day APPUiO TechLabs with more time to provide in-depth knowledge and access to the top experts.

Register here

Voxxed Days Zürich returns to Sihlcity Cinema on February 23rd, 2017. The entire developer community can meet and hear from some of the most inspiring speakers in our sector.

Also APPUiO will be present. In our Mini Techlabs participants learn hands-on the key steps how applications are deployed to the cloud and how a container can be deployed und operated.

voxxeddays.com/zurich/

It’s now possible to pay a monthly fee for APPUiO, the Swiss Container Platform. The price for the public service is between CHF 49.- and CHF 340.- per month. If you decide to pay a full year in advance we’ll give you two months for free.

Read more