Understanding Docker with an Analogy from Traditional Software Development

Docker, a Linux container that is becoming increasingly popular with developers for deploying apps to a cloud infrastructure. Docker allows application data to sync with the OS running on the cloud infrastructure. That means a developer can work directly from their desktop environment and use Docker to automatically sync updates.

Suppose a traditional software developer which follows the below steps as the development process.

1. Checkout a remote SVN/Git repository to the local file system 
2.  Improve the code in the local repository 
3. Test the code in local repository 
4. Push the modifications back to the remote repository, so others can update those modifications 

Then pushing those modifications to the production deployment is handled by a separate deployment engineering team. As developers only test their modifications in a local environment rather in the production environment, there can be bugs introduced in the production environment. This is mainly due to configuration differences between the local test environment and the production environment. This sort of bugs cause a lot of friction in the deployment process.

Docker tries to tackle this. Comparing with a source code repository system (SVN/Git) which manages the source code, Docker manage the complete software deployment (i.e. source code, configuration) as a "Container". This ensures every developer test their code in a developer environment exact similar to the production environment.

When it comes to maintaing the configuration of components with in the Container, it follows a JSON representation as follows.

Multi-tenancy: Winning formula for a PaaS

Today at WSO2Con-2011, Dr. Srinath Perera discussed about what's multi-tennacy and the multi-tenant architecture of WSO2 Carbon platform. Also he talked about multi-tennacy matuarity models and how each of them has different garualarity of sharing and isolation. Then he went through the design and implementation of data isolation, execution isolation and performance isolation in WSO2 Stratos which is the cloud platform for enterprise applications. Finally he discussed about the performance over-haed on multi-tenant applications compared with its normal counterpart.

Multi-tenancy: Winning formula for a PaaS

View more presentations from Srinath Perera

Business Process hosting in Cloud

Introduction
In this post I’m going to discuss about some concerns of hosting business processes in cloud. First we’ll discuss around the concept of multi-tenancy and a multi-tenancy architecture for business process executions. Then we’ll move on to our main topic of hosting business processes in cloud and the concerns wrapped around it.
WSO2 Stratos BPS is a WS-BPEL compliant business process run-time PaaS whose architecture supports multi-tenancy in the cloud. So the users can host the enterprise level WS-BPEL business processes in WSO2 Stratos BPS and manage them. So we’ll refer it to elaborate more on some of the following sections.

Table of Content

• Introduction
• Terminology

• Multi-tenancy
  
  • What’s multi-tenancy?
  • Virtualization
  • Goals?
  • Importance
  • What’s in it for business processes?

• Hosting business processes in cloud
  
  • Advantages
  • Concerns
    
    • QoS
      
      • Throttling
      • Security
  • Billing, Metering, Logging and Business intelligence for Business Processes
    
    • Billing and Metering
    • Logging
  • Tooling support

• References