The document presents an evaluation of Stackato, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution by ActiveState, focusing on its utility for developers in terms of deployment and management of applications using Perl and other languages. It highlights features such as ease of deployment, management console capabilities, and the minimal differences between development and production environments while noting existing issues with service integrations and custom components. The author advocates for Stackato as a significant part of future infrastructure due to its benefits in accessibility and reproducibility.

1. Stackato
- a developers experiences and evaluation
by jonasbn for Open Source Days 2012

2. Disclaimer
• I am jonasbn - like almost everywhere
• Long time Perl and web developer
• Open Source/CPAN contributor and
previously freelance developer in logicLAB
• Currently employed with DK Hostmaster
• I have no affiliation with ActiveState

3. Developer Needs
• Easy access to platform, runtimes and
frameworks
• The least possible gap between
development, test and production
• Minimal differences between deployed
code and the code in the editor
• reproducibility for transparency

4. What do we have?
• Unit-tests
• Mocked objects and classes, stubs a.s.o
• Local servers / emulators
• Virtualization
• Dedicated environments (dev/test/prod)
• Code - lots of code...

5. the Cloud
• What is the cloud?
• What problem does it solve?
• What needs does it address?

6. Williamstown Theatre Festival?

7. Talking Cloud
• You cannot ignore
Amazon and EC2

8. Dr. Matt Wood (@mtz)
• Technology Evangelist with Amazon,
working with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• http://youtu.be/NT-ccnFMBWA
• from Internetdagarna 2011 in Stockholm/
Sweden

9. Dr. Matt Wood / Heavy Lifting

10. Dr. Matt Wood / 30%

11. Points from Dr. Matt Wood
• 30-70% divide The general issue of development
vs. operations is quite wide-
spread, see something like the
GOTOCPH conference 2011 with
• IT infrastructure friction
a dedicated track
• Focus on your core competences
• Focus on delivering value
• http://www.slideshare.net/FDIHdk/ahead-in-
the-cloud-matt-wood-amazon

12. Amazon EC2
• Amazon EC2 however does not get us
there - no matter how much elasticity it
provides
• http://aws.amazon.com/

13. Perl in the cloud?
• @ActiveState introduces #stackato
based on phenona and Cloud
Foundry
• http://www.activestate.com/stackato
• http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

14. Stackato
• A micro cloud
• current version 1.0.4
• just out of beta, released 2012.02.29
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Supporting several languages, their
frameworks and widely-used services

16. Hello World!
first demo: in Perl using Mojolicious

17. recap
first demo: in Perl using Mojolicious

18. initial deployment
• target, where do we want to deploy
• login, it is all a matter of permissions
• push, a “one-click” CLI deployment

19. Requirements
• PPM (ActivePerl)
• CPAN (App::cpanminus)
• requirements.txt

20. Sandboxing
• local::lib, encapsulates in a Perl sandbox
• Your apps will not intrude on each other
- unless you want them too

21. inspecting deployment
• logs
• crashes
• crashlogs
• files

22. operating
• start, start a service
• stop, stop a service
• restart, restart a service
• this is about it, for what I can provide, I
have no experience with long time
operation of a Stackato deployed service
• Oh there is one more thing...

23. Management
Console
second demo: the built in management console

24. Hello Open
Source Days
third demo: in Perl using Mojolicious

25. recap
third demo: in Perl using Mojolicious

26. updating
• update, when an application has been
pushed (deployed) this is the command you
will use
• stackato.yml - a configuration file for
assisting deployment

27. All the little things
• binding DNS, going beyond mDNS
• binding services (databases et al.)
• resource allocation, memory, instances etc.
• logging (more on this later...)
• now for some architecture...

29. Support
• @ActiveState fora
• #stackato on irc://irc.freenode.org with
users and ActiveState staff
• Webcasts
• White papers
• ActiveState are incredibly open and
cooperative

30. Open Source Examples
• @ActiveState examples on Github
• my own fork is on Github
• Github is nice!

31. Stackato is not
• Open Source - it is closed and proprietary
• @ActiveState is however dedicated to
keeping the micro-cloud solution free

32. So what is in it?

33. Targets!
• Multiple targets
• development / test / production
• Targets make sense in SCM context
• trunk / branches / tags (releases)
• You could just go for the micro-cloud, but
you would loose some of the benefits

35. My Current Issues
• Oracle as a service (DBD::Oracle and driver
distribution issue)
• Cryptographic components (export of PPMs)
• Deployment of custom components
• Service integration (PostgreSQL)
• Full blown examples (Mojolicious over
Mojolicious::Lite etc.)
• mDNS and dynamic DNS (might be .local)

36. Conclusion
• The Stackato cloud is awesome
• @ActiveState mean serious business
• I am going to present and propose Stackato
as a part of our future infrastructure

37. Benefits
• Easy and controlled access to platform,
runtimes and frameworks
• The least possible gap between development,
test and production and minimal differences
between deployed code and the code in the
editor depending on your cloud deployment
• reproducibility for transparency since the
amount of magic is kept at a minimum

38. IDE Integration
fourth demo: Komodo IDE 7

39. Surprise!
Komodo IDE 7 license
courtesy of @ActiveState

40. Game On!
pick a number - any number!

41. jonasbn!
• @jonasbn, jonasbn@logicLAB.dk
• Blogs: logicLAB.org and logicLAB.dk
• Presentation on Slideshare.com
• logicLAB Open Wiki
• do you have 5 minutes! - of course

42. References
• http://www.slideshare.net/FDIHdk/ahead-in-the-cloud-matt-wood-amazon
• http://youtu.be/NT-ccnFMBWA
• http://logiclab.dk/wordpress/2011/11/30/internetdagarna-day-2-matt-wood/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF
• http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2011/09/wait-what-is-cloud-computing.html/
• http://www.activestate.com/stackato
• http://www.cloudfoundry.com/
• https://logiclab.jira.com/wiki/display/OPEN/Stackato
• https://github.com/jonasbn/stackato-samples
• https://github.com/ActiveState/stackato-samples
• http://aws.amazon.com/