Category: open source

Deploy the Reactive Cloud Native Starter example to IBM Cloud

Leave a comment

The Cloud Native Starter project now contains the new great topic, the development of Reactive Microservices  with Java, quarkus, MicroProfile and Vue.js as front-end. The Reactive example implementation runs on minikube, local OpenShift and on IBM Cloud Kubernetes.

But what does reactive mean? Here is an extract of the definition in  The Reactive Manifesto.

“Systems built as Reactive Systems are more flexible, loosely-coupled and scalable. This makes them easier to develop and amenable to change. They are significantly more tolerant of failure and when failure does occur they meet it with elegance rather than disaster. Reactive Systems are highly responsive, giving users effective interactive feedback.” 

But be aware, our example is not a full Reactive System it shows reactive programming techniques.

Note: To understand the difference between these two topics, that badge on cognitiveclass is useful Reactive Architecture: Introduction to Reactive Systems.

In our reactive programming example, you see directly changes in the database on the Web UI, without refreshing the browser.

reactive-sample

In this blog post I want to share, how you deploy that awesome Reactive example to a free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster and using the free quota of the IBM Cloud Container Registry. We avoid for the setup that you have to use any paid IBM Cloud services, because you want just to see how the Reactive example works on IBM Cloud.
To create a free Cluster you need a feature code to create a Trial Account or you create a pay as you go account and you only use the free services of IBM Cloud.

That is the major architecture of the Reactive example. Three Java Microservices, one Vue UI application and two infrastructure components running on Kubernetes.

reactive-architecture

But what is reactive programming in more detail? If you want to get more details of the Reactive topic, just visit the blog post Development of Reactive Applications with Quarkus from Niklas Heidloff and if you want to explore the setup for local OpenShift take a look into the blog post Cloud Native Starter on Red Hat OpenShift 4 from Harald Uebele.

Continue reading →

How to deploy a container to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service

2 Comments

I want to describe another way to run the  Highscores-Service of the #BlueCloudMirror game . In the game I use  IBM Cloud Foundry apps, now I want to explore IBM Cloud Kubernetes.

Note: The #BlueCloudMirror game we  @Niklas, @Harald and I made, is available as an Pattern on IBM Developer.

The first step was creating a container for the Highscores-Service,  which I described in my blog post how to build a container.

In this post I deploy my scores-service container to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service.  This is  not a blueprint for IBM Kubernetes deployments, if you looking for a blueprint,  just take a look here. IBM Cloud documentation contains a great guide for getting started:  How to setup and use IBM Cloud Kubernetes

I share my experiences and observations with you, along with my deployment.

Let’s start with an overview of the topics I touch in this blog post:

Simplified Architecture 

kube-basic-architecture

The above picture shows a simplified architecture for the scores-service inside Kubernetes. You can see the relevant elements for the deployment. If you are interested in the details of  these elements, just click on the linked Kubernetes documentation.

The major elements:

Continue reading →

big open source players were “cap by hat” @w-jax

Leave a comment

I was at winter-jax 2018 in Munich last week. This was my first time I attended this big developer conference.

IMG_1948.JPG

As you can see in the headline picture, two big players in open source area with cap by hat and  IBM, RedHat booths and with Viada  😉

One major topic this week was the potential deal, IBM is planning to buy RedHat for 34 billion US dollars. This potential deal played a big part in Sebastian Meyen´s opening speech on the first day of the winter jax conference in Munich.

He highlighted the history and  Red Hat´s contribution to open source.

If you want to listen his speech in German, you can watch the sessionon youtube here  . His speech is before the keynote “Trust and confidence through chaos” from Russ Miles

By the way, I like Russ Miles´s approach to “chaos engineering” .

My very high-level free interpretation of “chaos engineering” is:

  • “Break the system, before it breaks your business!”

From my point of view “chaos engineering” is more or less comparable with testing. So, I defined more detailed, free interpretations:

  • “Don’t be afraid and learn from testing/failure”
  • “Bad news … yes, testers want to break your system, but the good news is: they will do it, before you run it in production 😉 “

Open source contribution

A very good match to the open source topic was the keynote from Christopher Ferris.

He asked the good question: Who pays for open source?  You can watch his session on youtube here

Christopher Ferris reminded us in his speech that IBM is a major player and contributer in open source, with a high involvement in Apache , Eclipse and Linux  during the creation and in development. These three projects are fundamental pillars for the open source business.

There are many other open source projects IBM contributes to, which you can find here  on the  IBM Developer site.

IMG_2057.JPG

Christopher Ferris during his keynote.

Open Source in AI

Also, Niklas Heidloff gave a session “Development of AI Applications without Machine Learning Skills”. In this session, Niklas also highlighted the topic open source with the Model Asset eXchange . The Model Asset eXchange contains free, deployable, and trainable code.

It is also very important to understand that these models on Model Asset eXchange are reusable for production, because they have licenses developers can verify.

IMG_1980.jpg

Image of the session from Niklas Heidloff. Here you can see some impressions from Niklas.

Open Source in Java

Steve Poole highlighted in his session “What’s new for Java in clouds?” that IBM open sourced OpenJ9 (Low memory footprint). Steve also reminded us in his session, that the Java community should be more active and should define the needs for cloud, machine learning and upcoming technologies like Quantum.

By the way Fernando Cejas did a session about Quantum Computing, you can check a sample here  “Quantum computing in action: IBM’s Q experience and the quantum shell game”.

IMG_2002

Moments

If you want to see our favourite moments of this conference, just visit the twitter moments from Miriam Oglesby.

Let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

PS: By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.