Cloud Foundry Summit 2016

I had the great opportunity this past week to travel to Santa Clara, California for the Cloud Foundry Summit 2016.  This week showed me how strong the Cloud Foundry community is.  The keynotes and breakout sessions were some of the best I have ever attended.  As you can see below, this summit was the largest Cloud Foundry gathering in history.

I wanted to go through some of the lessons I learned going to these sessions and talking with other people in different stages of their Cloud Foundry journey.

Test Your Platform

It is not only a great idea to have platform metrics and alerts, but that can only tell part of the story.  A great idea was to run tests to make sure your platform is operating properly.  These checks can be done through periodically creating test orgs/spaces, pushing apps, scaling apps, removing apps, removing test orgs, etc.  These tasks are checking that functionality is still working inside of your environment.  One example I was directed to was cf-smoke-tests.

Another project I was directed to was chaos-lemur.  This project was designed to test high availability within your Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment.  It will randomly destroy any VM that BOSH knows about.  It is a good idea to start off by running it in "Dry Run" mode first.

Transparency
One of the key messages I heard over and over is transparency.  Working with the consumers of your platform is an important aspect of your deployment.  Providing your consumers with platform metrics or results of the platform testing that I mentioned above, this information will give people a place to go to quickly to find platform status.  It also gives a common starting place to where both an operator and consumer of the platform can go to if a problem were to arise.  It is a conversation starter when addressing issues openly.

One project I saw for Cloud Foundry status pages was Cachet-cf.  I have not used this project yet, but I am interested in investigating this functionality and reporting back in a future blog post.

Community
Seeing is believing for me.  I know Cloud Foundry has a great open-source community, but seeing it in person was an eye-opener.  It proves the point to me that bringing this sense of community within the organization is very powerful.

Transparency as I talked above is one aspect of bringing a group of people together.  When everyone has all of the information in front of them, it will bring more open discussions to the table.

Another way to build a community is paired working.  This style of working together could be two operators working together on a platform issue or an operator and developer working on an app issue.  These face to face pairing sessions are more powerful than sending emails back and forth.  It provides that there is a person behind a problem and not just a random problem ticket number.

Once a problem is solved, there should be a place to post that resolution.  A community site within your organization would be a great spot for these resolutions.  As new people are hired or introduced to this platform, they have a place to go to for answers or post their own solutions.

Summary
These three topics are only some of the things that this summit taught me.  Cloud Foundry is growing every day.  Make sure to research more about them here.  I look forward to going to next year's Cloud Foundry Summit.

~RRRII