I'm not the GP. But if I were setting up infrastructure for a fledgling startup today, I'd want a PaaS-in-a-box that worked like this:
Given these inputs:
* A minimum of 3 Linux servers: These could be VMs or bare-metal servers. They're all in the same data center. They each have 1 public IP address. Other than that, there's no network between them. Each of these nodes has at least 4 GB of RAM and a healthy amount of SSD storage. Note that I'm perfectly comfortable manually provisioning a fixed number of nodes, and manually adding more if truly necessary, because predictable cost is important.
Edit: The platform should assume that each node has a bare installation of Ubuntu or CentOS. Don't make me install something custom. And ideally, don't be picky about the kernel, because some dedicated server hosts provide their own.
Edit 2: All nodes should be treated equally. Any of them may become the master when needed. There should be no dedicated master; all nodes should be available to run applications. After all, resources are tight, and I want to get the most out of those three servers.
* An API for creating and updating DNS records, e.g. Amazon Route 53, DNSimple, etc.
* Edit: An off-site object store (e.g. Amazon S3, Backblaze B2) where the cluster can automatically send backups of all durable storage.
The PaaS-in-a-box should give me an installation script to run on each node. During installation, I provide my DNS API credentials and the domain(s) I want the platform to manage. Edit: I'd also provide credentials for the off-site backup object storage. And I forgot that when installing on the second and subsequent nodes, I'd provide the public IP of an existing node during installation.
And that's it. The cluster then manages itself, distributing durable storage among the nodes using something like Ceph for file storage, and DB-level replication for the supported database(s). HTTP/HTTPS traffic can be load-balanced among nodes using round-robin DNS, with unhealthy nodes automatically removed from the DNS records by one of the remaining nodes. If I need to run an outward-facing non-HTTP service, I should be able to reserve one or more ports for it and run it in either a round-robin or active/standby configuration with automatic failover.
Perhaps this is a tall order. Is it impossible to do this on top of something as last-decade as a handful of manually provisioned dedicated servers, with only the public network between them (but in the same data center)? I hope not, because that kind of server, while now out of fashion, is attractive to a company on a shoestring budget that nevertheless doesn't want to compromise performance.
Anyway, if a product meeting these requirements exists, I don't yet know about it. Cloud Foundry certainly doesn't market itself for that kind of deployment.
> Cloud Foundry certainly doesn't market itself for that kind of deployment.
Historically customers of Pivotal, IBM, etc focused on high availability requirements, which requires more machines. I've seen the default deployment for megacorps and it is, essentially, "bring all your dollars". But that is what they want -- no single points of failure. That means multiple VMs for everything. In fact it usually means multiple AZs for everything -- every component replicated thrice in at least two widely separated locations.
Even so, we've done work to split the difference. There's a "small footprint" version of PCF which is 4-9 VMs depending on how much risk you feel like taking. There's also cfdev if you just want to kick tires.
For the rest I can point to this and that. Service brokers for stuff like the DNS, traffic is directed by Gorouter or TCPRouter currently (with plans to switch to Istio), backups by BOSH Backup & Restore (BBR), running on raw hardware if the provider uses RackHD or can give you a BOSH Cloud Programming Interface (CPI).
BOSH is probably where you'd need to make your deepest peace. It has a very emphatic model of operations, which is that you are building a distributed system from known-good states, so individual machines are there solely to be paved whenever necessary. BOSH manages everything down to the operating system on the machine. You give it keys to an API that can provision compute, disks and networks and it will do the rest.
The uniform node thing would be tricky and my hunch is that, requiring a bunch of de novo engineering, would be less reliable on average than current arrangements.
Given these inputs:
* A minimum of 3 Linux servers: These could be VMs or bare-metal servers. They're all in the same data center. They each have 1 public IP address. Other than that, there's no network between them. Each of these nodes has at least 4 GB of RAM and a healthy amount of SSD storage. Note that I'm perfectly comfortable manually provisioning a fixed number of nodes, and manually adding more if truly necessary, because predictable cost is important.
Edit: The platform should assume that each node has a bare installation of Ubuntu or CentOS. Don't make me install something custom. And ideally, don't be picky about the kernel, because some dedicated server hosts provide their own.
Edit 2: All nodes should be treated equally. Any of them may become the master when needed. There should be no dedicated master; all nodes should be available to run applications. After all, resources are tight, and I want to get the most out of those three servers.
* An API for creating and updating DNS records, e.g. Amazon Route 53, DNSimple, etc.
* Edit: An off-site object store (e.g. Amazon S3, Backblaze B2) where the cluster can automatically send backups of all durable storage.
The PaaS-in-a-box should give me an installation script to run on each node. During installation, I provide my DNS API credentials and the domain(s) I want the platform to manage. Edit: I'd also provide credentials for the off-site backup object storage. And I forgot that when installing on the second and subsequent nodes, I'd provide the public IP of an existing node during installation.
And that's it. The cluster then manages itself, distributing durable storage among the nodes using something like Ceph for file storage, and DB-level replication for the supported database(s). HTTP/HTTPS traffic can be load-balanced among nodes using round-robin DNS, with unhealthy nodes automatically removed from the DNS records by one of the remaining nodes. If I need to run an outward-facing non-HTTP service, I should be able to reserve one or more ports for it and run it in either a round-robin or active/standby configuration with automatic failover.
Perhaps this is a tall order. Is it impossible to do this on top of something as last-decade as a handful of manually provisioned dedicated servers, with only the public network between them (but in the same data center)? I hope not, because that kind of server, while now out of fashion, is attractive to a company on a shoestring budget that nevertheless doesn't want to compromise performance.
Anyway, if a product meeting these requirements exists, I don't yet know about it. Cloud Foundry certainly doesn't market itself for that kind of deployment.