Leverage the Cloud for your Python & Perl Applications. Stackato Offers a Fast, Simple Way to Deploy Webs Apps to the Cloud

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1 Leverage the Cloud for your Python & Perl Applications Stackato Offers a Fast, Simple Way to Deploy Webs Apps to the Cloud White Paper Published in 2011

2 Leverage the Cloud for your Python & Perl Applications Stackato Offers a Fast, Simple Way to Deploy Webs Apps to the Cloud Migrating to the Cloud is Getting Easier Moving house is never a simple proposition. Beyond the logistical hassle that involves the packing and hauling of goods from one place to the next, there s also the issue of whether all that stuff will actually work in your new place. Because sometimes the furniture just doesn t fit. So moving comes with the additional cost of having to replace perfectly good furnishings with pieces configured specifically to your new space. Until recently, porting applications to the cloud has been a lot like moving house. It s a new environment with a lot of amenities, but your applications still need to work in the new space. And that has previously meant scrapping perfectly good code and starting from scratch. But moving applications to the cloud is getting a lot easier -- and there are a lot of good business reasons to do so. What is the Cloud, Exactly? The cloud consists mainly of third-party hosted computing resources accessed on an as-needed basis. Since its rise to popularity in 2008, cloud computing has come to represent a significant benefit for both enterprises and small businesses, taking the onus off businesses when it comes to investing in infrastructure hardware, software and IT resources by providing these resources via remote data centres and making them available on an elastic pay-as-you-go resourcing model. Businesses and developers can access the software, infrastructure, and platforms they need, when they need it, and scale up or down as required without hassle. But the cloud also brings with it concerns around security and reliability. Well-known public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services have drawn their share of ire for downtime resulting in large service outages for their clients. As a result, some businesses have delayed their move to the cloud, or have turned to private cloud options to ensure security and assume full control over reliability. 1

3 Cloud Computing Offers Many Business Benefits The benefits of moving to the cloud outweigh the drawbacks for many businesses, as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings provide tangible business benefits that include cost savings, resource efficiencies, portability and scalability. Abstract Resources Equal Cost Efficiencies No business wants to invest in more infrastructure than it needs. And yet, traditional resourcing models require anticipating demand and carrying upfront capital expenditures that can end up costing your business more. Using cloud resources means businesses don t have to invest in the physical hardware required to build and host web applications servers, hard drives, etc. Cloud resources essentially become an operational expense that businesses can access as needed without upfront investment and sunk costs. On-Demand Provisioning Means Instant Scalability On-demand provisioning of resources allows businesses to scale up when they need to, and scale down when they no longer need the resources. And the provisioning is instantaneous no waiting on financing, orders and fulfillment. So when your business experiences an unexpected demand on resources, the cloud allows you to meet that demand effortlessly. Elasticity Allows for Capacity Fluctuations Elasticity gives businesses the ability to add capacity and to scale up whenever they need and how much they need -- from a single CPU to dozens with a single command or click. Pay as You Go Saves on Upfront Investment When businesses make use of cloud infrastructure, they re only paying for what they use. They re removing the need for long-term financial commitments to IT resources, hardware and even power, and paying only for exactly what they need, when they need it. 2

4 What the Cloud Offers The Cloud Comes in Many Shapes and Sizes Cloud offerings can be divided by service type: Software as a Service (SaaS) was introduced first and is generally the most well-known among business users, thanks to such widely used services as Google Docs and Salesforce.com. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is typically defined as a shared, multi-tenant, virtualized infrastructure managed via a self-service portal with pay-as-you-go fees. Providers such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace are the primary examples of this increasingly popular service model. Platform as a Service (PaaS) fits in between, providing everything necessary for an application to run: hardware (virtualized or not), operating system, database, language runtime, modules and web framework. Heroku is one popular example, providing an efficient, managed platform on which to run Ruby web applications. These service types can be further divided by privacy level, an important factor for companies with concerns, strict policies, or compliance requirements for information isolation, security, or data privacy. Private clouds have evolved to fill this need. Private vs. Public Cloud Solutions Private clouds also leverage server virtualization to capitalize on the same advantages offered by public clouds self-service, scalability and elasticity while providing the additional security, control and customization afforded by dedicated resources. The primary differentiator of a private cloud is that it is operated solely for a specific organization, either by the organization itself or by a third party. Implementation behind a corporate firewall is often vital to ensure data privacy, security and control. Private clouds make good sense for large enterprises that have specific internal IT requirements that public cloud services cannot reliably fulfill, or for companies with application or security requirements that are not compatible with the shared public resource model. 3

5 vsphere and Other Virtualization Platforms Virtualization platforms such as VMware s vsphere give system administrators the freedom to innovate and deploy applications while shielding them from some of the the complexity of deploying servers, storage and network infrastructure. The result is a resilient environment that responds rapidly to changing business requirements. The goal is to maximize use of infrastructure while making it significantly easier for IT resources to focus on delivering business solutions instead of spending time on routine maintenance or system provisioning. This is accomplished by automating management to ensure dynamic allocation of resources across the private cloud. One of the main strengths of virtualization has always been consolidation of infrastructure to save costs in areas such as power, real estate, and cooling. Applying a private cloud approach to infrastructure enables businesses to share server resources including computing, data storage and networking to efficiently shoulder internal application load while being ready to scale up for upcoming load from new applications. The end result is a resilient environment that will readily respond to changing business requirements. Amazon EC2 vs. Rackspace Amazon has built a very strong reputation as a thought leader in the cloud space with a compelling, automated, cost-effective, contract-free infrastructure offering called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon s massive capacity pool gives confidence to those who are managing workloads that may require rapid provisioning of hundreds of servers for a short period of time. Full API access to infrastructure is well supported and augmented by third parties, while several vendors have specific software packages designed and licensed to operate on EC2. EC2 instances are broken down into various levels of processing power. Standard instances are broken down into three categories that scale based on common metrics such as processing power, memory and storage. In addition to these categories, several customized instance types such as high-memory, high-cpu and GPU exist to ensure a good fit for a given application s resource profile. Amazon has a private cloud solution with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which enables customers to provision scalable private infrastructure, specify a private IP address range of their choosing, and then connect the resources to the corporate data centre using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. Rackspace is the market share leader in managed hosting and brings a strong self-managed IaaS hosting solution backed by its well-respected customer service. Its cloud hosting service allows businesses to select a server size in memory, choose an operating system from several Linux and Windows options, and then bring the server online and manage it using online control panel and API tools. Several add-on options are available including data storage, load balancing and managed services targeted at companies that do not have the inhouse IT muscle to do so themselves. 4

6 Stackato is really cool and we plan on moving our production stack onto a Private PaaS within the next 2 months or so. With Stackato as our cloud platform, our developers and administrators can focus on building applications, not configuring machines or middleware. Stackato will help us get our web applications up and running very quickly. Mike Frager, Software Developer, Dial Your Leads I was impressed with the first preview of Stackato. I had a Mojolicious app running on a private cloud within 5 minutes! It took longer to figure out how to install the competitor s client than to setup a whole Stackato private cloud. Rackspace Private Cloud offers dedicated services using the vsphere platform from VMware. Rackspace offers a flexible and customizable solution for a private single-tenant environment, enabling hybrid solutions that balance aspects of managed hosting and public cloud as appropriate for customer needs. A strong fault tolerance and hot swap implementation enables a 100 per cent uptime guarantee. Robust VM management tools ensure rapid provisioning, cost savings by shutting off VMs that are not currently in use, and the ability to save snapshots of the OS and applications to enable safe rollback in case of problems. Python and Perl in the Cloud Python and Perl applications are well-suited to the cloud environment whether in a public or private cloud. Web applications often experience huge spikes in usage and load, a clear case where a cloud deployment can offer instant scalability, elasticity and dynamic provisioning. There are many examples of large, scalable public applications built with Python and Perl just look at YouTube, Reddit, Dropbox, Evite and Google Gears to see how Python and Perl have proven their value. As highly practical programming languages, Python and Perl are well-known and backed by a strong open source community. Not only are there many existing enterprise applications written in Python and Perl, but the languages are supported by a community of programmers who know how to leverage the numerous add-on modules and web frameworks to make development even easier. Sebastien Riedel, creator of Catalyst and Mojolicious Perl web frameworks. Python and Perl have a large body of existing code to build on. Both languages have thousands of modules available from PyPI and CPAN (or ActiveState s Python Package Manager [PyPM] and Perl Package Manager [PPM]), including many modules for interfacing with popular databases such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL. They also have robust web frameworks to rival Ruby on Rails or the many Java frameworks. For Python there are Django, Pyramid, Pylons, TurboGears, and Zope; for Perl there are Catalyst, Mojolicious, Dancer and HTML-Mason. While Ruby (Rails), Java, PHP, and more recently Node.js are often highlighted as languages for the cloud, Python and Perl are often overlooked. But with new and evolving frameworks available, there are no technical limitations in deploying Python and Perl applications to the cloud. Do-it-Yourself Stacks for Python and Perl Until recently, running Python or Perl applications in the cloud involved building the application environment manually. This method allows a certain measure of flexibility, but also requires in a lot more time and effort to get up and running compared with PaaS solutions. 5

7 Once you ve selected an IaaS service and signed up, you ll need to select a Virtual Machine (VM) image, install the software stack, including a web server, database, either Python or Perl, your chosen web framework and additional modules. Once your VM has this software stack installed, you ll need to spend time configuring it to ensure it suits your needs before you ll be ready to begin working with it. Platform services offer a significant savings in effort and time. While it is more common for PaaS to be thought of in a hosted scenario, the approach is now being applied to the private cloud to accelerate the internal development process with all the typical PaaS advantages delivered inside the company firewall. This is now available for Python and Perl. Cloud Foundry Offers First Open Source PaaS The first open source PaaS offering for Ruby, Node.js and Java was launched by VMware in April Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps and includes: a self-service application execution engine, a scriptable command line interface, and an automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management, an open architecture for further framework integration. ActiveState has taken a leading role in delivering innovative capabilities for Python and Perl developers on top of VMware s Cloud Foundry platform. Openness, ease of use, and flexibility are important to enterprises deploying apps in the cloud. ActiveState s Stackato is a great option for enterprises that, for security and other reasons, want the flexibility to create a private cloud or private PaaS environment. Christopher Keene, VP Cloud Computing Ecosystem, VMware Focus on Fast Deployment A key feature of Cloud Foundry is fast deployment, but it also cuts the cost and complexity of configuring infrastructure and runtime environments. Developers can deploy their applications to CloudFoundry.com using existing tools and with minimal modification to the code. Cloud Foundry allows developers to focus on applications, not machines or middleware. Traditional application deployments require developers to configure and patch systems, maintain middleware and worry about network topologies. Cloud Foundry enables focus on the application, not the infrastructure, in order to deploy and scale applications in seconds. Cloud Foundry is Open and Extensible While most PaaS offerings restrict a developer s choice of frameworks, application infrastructure services and cloud provider, Cloud Foundry allows developers to use their existing infrastructure while making use of the benefits of PaaS. Cloud Foundry has shown that a meta-framework for provisioning application environments can be just as slick as the best PaaS providers, while offering multiple languages and deeper configurability. ActiveState has taken the Cloud Foundry platform, extended it to support Python and Perl, and made it into an enterprise-ready product for private clouds. 6

8 What s Included in Stackato Web Servers Nginx Apache Apache TomEE Data & Messaging Services MySQL MongoDB Redis RabbitMQ PostgreSQL Filesystem Languages ActivePython ActivePerl Java PHP Ruby Node.js Erlang Scala Clojure.NET Web Frameworks Django Flask Bottle Dancer Rails Sinatra Spring Pyramid Mojolicious Catalyst + more Stackato: Deploying Python and Perl Apps to the Cloud in Less than 15 Minutes Stackato is a software platform that sits on top of your cloud infrastructure to create your own reliable, secure, private PaaS and almost instantly deploy applications to the cloud. It works on self-hosted cloud computing platforms such as VMware vsphere or on third-party services such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace. It can even run as a micro-cloud VM on developer workstations using VMware Player, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox. Stackato automatically provisions the language, web framework and database your application relies on. IT teams set-up Stackato once to give development teams what they need without having to configure each application environment separately. This means more time can be spent on value-add development and less on configuration. What it means for Developers For developers deploying applications with Stackato, four simple commands is literally all you need: 1. Install the Stackato client 2. Set your target: stackato target api.example.com 3. Create a user or login: stackato login user@example.com 4. Push to the cloud: stackato push myapp It s really that simple. Using Stackato, development teams get the ability to: Move existing Python and Perl applications to the cloud Choose from a wide selection of languages, web frameworks, and databases for new application development Push applications to a local Stackato micro-cloud for testing, then re-target and deploy to a production environment Write, debug, test, and deploy using Komodo IDE or use their own development environments with the command-line client What it means for IT & System Administration Teams For IT teams under pressure to provide flexible environments for development teams, Stackato provides all the components to create a private PaaS, secure multi-tenant environments that auto-scale to meet performance demands. System administrators install a single application hosting platform that satisfies the needs of a broad range of users, without getting involved with each implementation. 7

9 About ActiveState ActiveState empowers innovation from code to cloud smarter, safer, and faster. ActiveState s cutting-edge solutions give developers and enterprises the power and flexibility to develop in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js, PHP, Tcl, and more. Stackato is ActiveState s groundbreaking cloud platform for creating a private platform as a service (PaaS), and is the cost-effective, secure, and portable way to develop and deploy apps to the cloud. ActiveState is proven for the enterprise: More than two million developers and 97% of Fortune-1000 companies use ActiveState s end-to-end solutions to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications. Global customers like Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, and Lockheed Martin look to ActiveState to save time, save money, minimize risk, ensure compliance, and reduce time to market. For more information, visit ActiveState Software Inc Granville Street Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2 Phone: Fax: business-solutions@activestate.com phone: Toll-free in North America