Welcome to the OpenStack Cloud App Lounge! Below you will find the fifth (5of6) app lab challenges. Each lab is a playful way to see if you have what it takes to be a 'Cloud Application Engineer' - the future of apps.
Before you begin, don't forget to setup your laptop with the OpenStack powered cloud of your choice.
- Building on the previous CloudAppLab, your customers: the professors are happy with your work! Congratulations, however with success come more users ergo more work.
- The Fractals application which you now have working accross multiple datacentres worldwide is starting to accumlate masses of data! Millions of fractals worldwide are being generated by researchers who are seeking the perfect prime fractal.
- The professors want to do analysis of all this data to do further research. They need this data to be easily and quickly accessible as they conduct their own research on the millions of fractal images which have been generated. As the professors are not trained software engineers their tools are basic, ranging from spreadsheets to some basic scripting via Matlab, R and some Python. They need the data accessible to these core tool which they use daily.
- Accordingly, in this lab you are going to need to collect the data in a single accessible (stateful) place.
- ...isolate your data in a single central hub which can feed data to other part of your application at other datacentres around the world.
- ...get to know people who understand how to balance network load between the different parts of your application like System Adminstrators, Network Engineers and Developer Operations.
- ...start to build up your understanding for the different 'Cloud Native Application Patterns' (stateless/stateful) which every 'Application Engineer' should have in their toolbox.
- Tweet a picture showing that your application has a cinder volume bit which is collecting and maintaining the state of your data for your other app workers to use, i.e take picture of your network topology or a video of your IDE with your cinder (block storage) volume serving data to your app workers.
- Get one of the Cloud App Pros to "❤" your tweet showing FOOBAR
- Once an App Pro has +1'd your tweet, come and show your ❤'d tweet to the helpdesk in the Cloud App Lab Lounge in the Marketplace (Expo Hall) to claim your StackerPoints.
- Understand what volume (block storage) is and how to mint and connect to it via shade.
- You'll also need to understand some networking patterns and how different nodes (data nodes vs app worker nodes) talk to one another, be that over public communication channels or private communication channels. You'll need help from your SysAdmin, NetEng and DevOpps, as this part of the stack is their 'bread and butter'.
- You'll need a load balancer to sit betwen your central hub of data and the workers requesting/sending data to the central hub. There are lots of options for load balancers, but for ease of use we'd suggest you get a
- For bonus points you could explore other cloud native application patterns such as the vitress database (from YouTube)
- Or just use this handy step-by-step instruction guide ;-)
Stuck on this lab, need some help to solve? Ping one of our Cloud App Lab Pros on Twitter/IRC. NB Open Source is about knowing who as much as it is about knowing what.
Recommended cloud app pros who can help (via Twitter/IRC):
- Ask Marcella why do I want to work with 'volume storage' for my stateless cloud application?
- Ask Steve how do 'cloud native' application work with data?
- Ask Craig what SDKs are best for attaching data to cloud apps?
- Ask Craig what are some of the best example of big data cloud apps?
Having trouble? Sit back and watch someone else solve this lab learning challenge ;-)
