One big question on twitter and my blog went unanswered. The question was ... How can someone else run this environment? In the previous blog post, I mentioned how there was no plan to make key components open source at that point in time.
Today, I am pleased to announce that all of the components to build this environment are now open source and anyone can reproduce this run of IBM Acme Air / NetflixOSS on Docker. All it takes is about an hour, a decent internet connection, and a laptop with VirtualBox (or boot2docker, or vagrant) installed.
Specifically, the aspects that we have added to open source are:
- Microscaler - a small scale instance health manager and auto recovery/scaling agent that works against the Docker remote API. Specifically we have released the Microscaler service (that implements a REST service), a CLI to make calling Microscaler easier, and a Microscaler agent that is designed to manage clusters of Docker nodes.
- The Docker port of the NetflixOSS Asgard devops console. Specifically we ported Asgard to work against the Docker API for managing IaaS objects such as images and instances as well as the Microscaler API for clusters. The port handles some of the most basic CRUD operations in Asgard. Some scenarios (like canary testing, red/black deployment) are yet to be fully implemented.
- The Dockerfiles and build scripts that enable anyone to build all of the containers required to run this environment. The Dockerfiles build containers of the Microscaler, the NetflixOSS infrastructural servers (Asgard, Eureka and Zuul), as well as the full microservices sample application Acme Air (web app, microservice and cassandra data tier). The build scripts help you build the containers and give easy commands to do the end to end deployment and common administration tasks.
If you want to understand what this runtime showcases, please refer to the previous blog entry. There is a video that shows the Acme Air application and basic chaos testing that proves the operational excellence of the environment.
Interesting compare:
It is interesting to note that the scope of what we released (the core of the NetflixOSS cloud platform + the Acme Air cloud sample/benchmark application) is similar to we previously released back at the Netflix Cloud Prize in the form of Amazon EC2 AMI's. I think it is interesting to consider the difference when using Docker in this release as our portable image format. Using Docker, I was able to easily release the automation of building the images (Dockerfiles) in source form which makes the images far more transparent than an AMI in the Amazon marketplace. Also, the containers built can be deployed anywhere that Docker containers can be hosted. Therefore, this project is going to be valuable to far more than a single cloud provider -- likely more on that later as Dockercon 2014 happens next week.
If you want to learn how to run this yourself, check out the following video. It shows building the containers for open source, starting an initial minimal environment and starting to operate the environment. After that go back to the previous blog post and see how to perform advanced operations.
Direct Link (HD Version)
