Presented at Cloud Foundry Summit, June 2014. In this talk, Jeff Hobbs will share his experiences building Stackato, based on Cloud Foundry. Stackato allows agile enterprises to develop and deploy software solutions faster than ever before and manage them more effectively. ActiveState has been part of the Cloud Foundry community from the beginning - through major revisions and numerous feature updates. Jeff will explore some of the changes in Stackato over time. Stackato's move to the Cloud Foundry v2 codebase will be discussed, and alongside the benefits, the different design and implementation approaches taken with Stackato. In closing, lessons learned will be drawn out.

1. Stackato and Lessons Learned
With Cloud Foundry
CF Summit, June 2014
Jeffrey Hobbs
CTO, ActiveState Software

2. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
About ActiveState
• Established 1997
• 2M+ developers, 97% of Fortune 1000 rely on ActiveState
• Deep knowledge breadth across programming languages and development
• Best-of-breed, highly scalable, minimal implementation requirements
• Founding Gold Member of Cloud Foundry foundation

3. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Industry Recognition
• Gartner
Research
2013
“Cool
Vendor
in
PaaS”
• Gartner
Research
2013
On-­‐Premise
App
Pla9orm
Magic
Quadrant
“Visionary”

4. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
What is Stackato?
+
=
+ Enterprise

5. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
The Path to Stackato
2011 2012 2013
CF Announced
April
Stackato PDP
June
Stackato Beta
November
Stackato 1.0
February
Stackato 2.0
July
Multipaas
Stackato 2.10
April
Stackato 3.0
December
Micro Cloud
Buildpacks
Centralized Logging
Linux Containers
Router-NG
2014
Stackato 3.2
March
CF v2
Docker
2D Zone Mgmt
App Auto-Scaling
App SSO

6. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
“Forking” Cloud Foundry v1
• Support for cron
• Management console
• Persistent file system service
• Logyard
• Kato (centralized cluster
management)
• Harbor (ports as a service)
• AOK (replaces UAA)
• Oracle DB provisioner
• Linux Containers
• Groups
• Enhanced RBAC
• Buildpacks
• Router2g
• Stackato client
• Komodo integration
• ssh & dbshell application
access
• Staging & Runtime Hooks

7. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Stackato & Cloud Foundry v1 -> v2
6 Months
3000+ changes

8. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Stackato 3 Architecture

9. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Playing Catch Up
• Totally revamped CF v2 codebase
• Even though mostly Ruby, Rails was swapped for Sinatra
• Completely new CF v2 API
• Client needed to maintain CF v1 support
• New Orgs and Spaces (replacing our existing Groups)
• Containers now standard
• Go components entering into core CF

10. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Merging Changes
• We merge core CF with every Stackato release cycle (quarterly)
• Merges now take about 2 person weeks
• Make sure the tests are passing … before and after!
• Value add pieces are merged over new changes, new features must be
evaluated

11. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Adding Value for Managers

12. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Adding Value for Admins

13. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Adding Value for Developers

14. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Where Next?
• Workload portability
• Interoperability
• CF and otherwise
• Leverage the best of open source

15. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Open Source CF Related Contributions
• https://github.com/ActiveState/
• stackato command line and JS client code
• CF v2 services connector
• Persistent filesystem service, elasticsearch and other services
• AOK (Ruby UAA replacement), with updates to OmniAuth
• PRs to core code
• Various buildpacks
• Related non-core tools

16. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Stackato & Cloud Foundry Summarized
• Stackato v3 based on Cloud Foundry v2
• Merges to CF core occur with every release cycle
• Cloud Foundry provides an excellent base to work with
• Composable elements, message passing, distributed system
• CF v2 API compatible
• Value add … it’s good, as long as you don’t break anything!
• Committed to using the best of open source

17. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Dogfooding

18. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Customer Happiness
“There is no reason
why as an IT
organization, you
should get in the way
of the success of
product…It comes
down to being able to
deploy code and
keeping the
infrastructure up.
That’s fundamental to
what our PaaS does.”
Chris Turra,
Web Operations
Engineer, Mozilla
“Instead of quickly
developing apps and
then running into the
brick wall of IT
backlogs, [with
Stackato], developers
can literally run with
their apps straight to
the cloud. Easily,
safely, and quickly.”
Dale McCrory, Principal
Product Manager,
ExactTarget
“With Stackato, we
maximize ‘Joyful Dev’
by automating as much
of the ‘Frustrating Ops’
as possible.”
Stackato use cases:
• Java mobile apps with
over 25,000 users
• Internal HR app with
1M requests per day
Mobile Device
Leader

19. activestate.com/stackato | @activestate | activestate.com/blog | Copyright 2014
Talented, creative people, developing innovative and cutting-edge solutions
one line of code at a time. We value honesty, respect, teamwork, learning,
originality, drive, and fun! Based in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia,
we contribute to cutting-edge projects that make a difference and push the
bleeding edge forward. Like to know more? Speak to us now!
Ac·ti·va·tors [ak-tuh-vey-tors]:
www.activestate.com/careers
• DevOps Engineers
• Systems Engineers
• Support Engineers
• Sales Engineers
• Technology Evangelists

20. Thank You!
Come see us at our table for more info
Free to try at activestate.com/stackato