Quick overview of AppFog PaaS platform

There is Openstack that aims to provide opensource IaaS solution for the Internet. But cloud has many faces and in a simplistic cloud taxonomy we can speak of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS as the main trends in the industry.

The video below provide a short introduction and comparison of Openstack and Appfog that is based on CloudFoundry. Both products embracing the open source developed paradigm. Both try to define standard and become leader in the respective domain.

As a bonus material for these who are interested in the overall technical system architecture this link  provide slides and video of Derek Collison (a lead technical architect for CloudFondry at Vmware) Cloud Foundry: Inside the Machine

Demonstration and example

1. You need to create a basic account that is free (but has resource limitation)
2. You can use the GUI to create your fist application
3. Use the CLI af (docu here) to get a look and feel what it is 

This is the automatically generated demo.

 
$ curl -v http://rado-python.hp.af.cm/
* About to connect() to rado-python.hp.af.cm port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 15.185.166.79... connected
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.22.0 (i686-pc-cygwin) libcurl/7.22.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.22 libssh2/1.2.7
> Host: rado-python.hp.af.cm
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: nginx
< Content-Type: text/plain
< Keep-Alive: timeout=300
< Content-Length: 34
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:25:30 GMT
< X-Varnish: 816993201
< Age: 0
< Via: 1.1 varnish
< Connection: keep-alive
<
* Connection #0 to host rado-python.hp.af.cm left intact
* Closing connection #0
Hello World! AppFog Python Support

Some info about the application hosted on AppFog.

 
C:\Users\radoslaw>af login
Attempting login to [https://api.appfog.com]
Email: xxx
Password: ************
Successfully logged into [https://api.appfog.com]

C:\Users\radoslaw>af info
AppFog Free Your Cloud Edition
For support visit http://support.appfog.com

Target:   https://api.appfog.com (v0.999)
Client:   v0.3.18.12

User:     xxx
Usage:    Memory   (384.0M of 2.0G total)
          Services (1 of 8 total)
          Apps     (2 of 9999 total)

# download the source code 
C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af pull rado-python
Pulling last pushed source code: OK

The source code for our fist hello word application is very simple.

 
import bottle
import os

def application(environ, start_response):
    data = "Hello World! AppFog Python Support"
    start_response("200 OK", [
            ("Content-Type", "text/plain"),
            ("Content-Length", str(len(data)))
            ])
    return iter([data])

By default only one instance (cloud server?) is spin up to host our app.

 
C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af stats rado-python

+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+---------------+
| Instance | CPU (Cores) | Memory (limit) | Disk (limit) | Uptime        |
+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+---------------+
| 0        | 0% (4)      | 26.1M (128M)   | 7.1M (1G)    | 0d:0h:58m:18s |
+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+---------------+

C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af instances rado-python

+-------+---------+--------------------+
| Index | State   | Start Time         |
+-------+---------+--------------------+
| 0     | RUNNING | 03/28/2013 12:34AM |
+-------+---------+--------------------+

On the GUI we can quickly and easily increase the number of instance. Once new instance is spun up and application code is cloned to it we see the changes on the CLI as well.

 
C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af stats rado-python

+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+--------------+
| Instance | CPU (Cores) | Memory (limit) | Disk (limit) | Uptime       |
+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+--------------+
| 0        | 0% (4)      | 26.1M (128M)   | 7.1M (1G)    | 0d:1h:2m:35s |
| 1        | 0.7% (4)    | 26.0M (128M)   | 0B (1G)      | 0d:0h:0m:58s |
+----------+-------------+----------------+--------------+--------------+

C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af instances rado-python

+-------+---------+--------------------+
| Index | State   | Start Time         |
+-------+---------+--------------------+
| 0     | RUNNING | 03/28/2013 12:34AM |
| 1     | RUNNING | 03/28/2013 01:35AM |
+-------+---------+--------------------+

After the testing we delete our application.

 
C:\Users\radoslaw\workspace\appfog>af delete rado-python

References

1. https://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/af-cli#max-os-x-linux
2. http://blog.appfog.com/getting-started-with-appfogs-command-line/
3. http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/editorials/appfog-vs-heroku/