Yesterday evening I headed up to the London PaaS User Group meeting as there were two Cloud Foundry related sessions on the agenda. First up was David Laing talking about the open source Logsearch project, a bosh deploy of an Elastic search ELK log analysis cluster. His employer (City Index) has this hooked up to Cloud Foundry system logs and, in some cases, they’re also using it for analysis of application logs with addition parsers. They’re looking for people to get involved in the project and help with the next phase: anomaly detection. One major hole in the solution as it currently stands: it’s only suitable for private PaaS as their is no access control over the logged data.
Up second was an entertaining pitch by Colin Humphreys, Founder and CEO of ours hosts CloudCredo, on how to sell hats to monkeys. That was the back story anyway, it was actually about how there is space in the stack for something that gives you the flexibility of IaaS over what you run but the simplicity of management, scaling and load balancing of PaaS. That something is Container as a Service. Specifically, the ability to push Docker files to Cloud Foundry using a custom stack for the DEA. Something that Colin is referring to as Decker.
Colin gave a nice demo but it is obviously still early days. Currently you can only push Docker files not images. There is also no staging at the moment – the image is created when each instance starts – consequently it is not taking any advantage of intermediate images. There is obviously lots of scope for improvement and it’s definitely one to watch. It was also interesting that Colin is currently focussing on the Docker side with the DEA interactions set to change with the introduction of Diego. The project is open source but Colin recommended waiting until he writes some docs before you try picking it up!