Welcome to the OpenStack Cloud App Lounge! Below you will find the fourth 'cloud app lab' challenge. Each lab is a playful way to see if you have what it takes to be a 'Cloud Application Engineer' - the future of apps.
Don't forget to setup your laptop with the OpenStack powered cloud of your choice.
- Imagine (fictionally): a recent scientific dsicovery from the CERN laboratories in Switzerland have revealed that fractals generated from prime numbers can predict the origins of the universe!
- A group of proffessors have written an applicaiton which generates fractals, however their cloud application is being inundated with requests from researchers worldwide who want to generate fracts.
- The professors have hired your team to help scale their fractal applicaiton so that it can dynamically scale and generate as many fractals as are being requsted by Physics and Mathematics departments worldwide!
- Perhaps most importantly, the professors (being poor researchers) need you to demonstrate you are using datacenters which are cost effective and competitive with one another to help keep costs down (and to assure government research funding is being distributed to multiple infrastructure providers).
- Can your team enable this simple cloud application to scale globally while still keeping the data locally?!
- ...re-factor your cloud application architecture to have multiple 'app workers' which can be dynamically scaled and placed at any OpenStack-powered-datacentre worldwide.
- ...meet community members who have built and maintained various stateless enterprise applications in production.
- ...understand the concept of 'state' (stateless/statefull) applications and the implications for different design patterns for managing various cloud app statless-ness.
- Tweet a picture showing that your application is working in multiple datacenters, i.e this could be a picture of your network topology, it could be a video of your IDE stopping/starting workers, etc.
- Get one of the Cloud App Pros to "❤" your tweet showing your app working as statelessly!
- 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.
- The Fractals Application is avaialble here, including instructions for a possible statelss architecture.
- You'll need to utilise the Shade SDK/API calls to manage your application across different OpenStack-powered-datacenters.
- Make sure you are managing your account details for each cloud via our clouds.yaml file and os-cloud-config.py library.
- Bonus points: pay attention to where your fractal workers are putting the fractals once they are generated.
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 (click links below to meet up and get help):
- Ask Chris: "how does one create scalable cloud app architectures which works cross-cloud?"
- Ask Martin "what's a hybird cloud app and what do I need to know about stateless apps?"
- Ask Victor "what kinds of 'cloud app platforms' are starting to support scaling and state"
- Ask Anne @annegentle "what are some apps which are using the different OpenStack APIs and SDKs?"
- Ask Edgar @emaganap "how can I get involved in the 'cloud app' user community?"
Having trouble? Sit back and watch someone else solve this lab learning challenge ;-)
