When Cloud Foundry became Open and Pivotal a year ago, part of our vision was to provide “an agile platform for agile teams” in the public cloud. Pivotal Web Services was born as a place agile teams could rapidly update and scale applications across multiple environments and let Cloud Foundry maintain their applications’ health in production. During the early access invitation period, we’ve been inspired by the creativity of thousands of developers like you as well as our own Spring and Pivotal Labs teams who have been building applications on Pivotal Web Services. Today we’re pleased to announce anyone can sign up to receive immediate free access and begin to push apps.
Commercial Offering for Access to More Resources
We also heard from developers the desire for a commercial offering with access to more resources as your applications grow and become successful. You can now upgrade for access to more application memory at the low price of $0.03/GB/HR, up to 10GB out of the box or contact us for more. Upgrading also opens the ability for you to build larger applications with premium service plans from popular 3rd party services like SendGrid, NewRelic, ClearDB, MongoLabs and many more from Marketplace.
Agile Platform for Agile Teams
Pivotal Web Services helps you deliver better software faster with integrated support for the agile software lifecycle:
Support for self-organizing teams
Spaces let you organize apps and services together to deliver your system, and provide a natural means for build/continuous integration (CI) pipeline integration by lifecycle stage
Organizations provide usage quotas and billing across spaces, and contain custom domains
Each organization and space let you designate access rights and permissions for members of your team based on their role
Developer Console brings all of this together in a simple, elegant dashboard
Easy CI pipeline integration, directly or via plugins
Cloud Foundry’s CF CLI let you use any combination of source code management (SCM) and build toolchain for CI automation
There are a number of plugins to ease CI integration: Maven, Gradle, Bamboo, CloudBees Jenkins-as-a-service. Travis CI is easy to automate as well.
One command to upload your files and have your app just work
Buildpacks stage all of your app’s runtime dependencies, including 3rd party libraries, app containers and frameworks, so your app just works
Service binding captures all connection and configuration per space in environment variables, eliminating environment specific code
Built-in operational benefits let you focus on your application code and rely on the platform to provide everything else:
Meet customer demand by dynamically scaling with one command
Your app is executed as a set of instances running in isolated containers
Scale out in seconds by adding app instances and have them immediately wired into an HA routing tier
Automate zero downtime deployments
You can map a single route to multiple applications as the basis for blue green deployments
Automatically switch between blue and green variants in your CI pipeline, e.g. using the gradle plugin
Rest easy with self-healing apps
An HA health manager monitors your app and automatically restarts failed instances in seconds, so you can rest easy and not have to rely on brittle watchdog solutions
Go to one log API for debugging
You can tail a real-time log stream to know everything about your application: application logging, staging events, router requests, lifecycle events, crashes and user events
Troubleshoot app behavior by draining the log to tools like Splunk or logstash
As we learned from some of our users, the Services Marketplace on PWS makes it almost trivial for you to add popular 3rd party services to your application for persistence, messaging and monitoring etc:
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and elasticsearch
SendGrid for email
New Relic for application performance monitoring
CloudAMQP or IronMQ for messaging
New, Faster Dynamic Developer Console with App Usage Dashboard
As a developer, you receive the latest updates from the Cloud Foundry community and Pivotal’s commercial efforts first at Pivotal Web Services. You can now take advantage of a newly redesigned, faster, and more dynamic Developer Console.
Get instant insights with the new Org Dashboard—in one glance you can see all your apps and services by space, usage against resource quotas and their status in a view that dynamically refreshes with no user intervention.
Developer Console page load times are now significantly faster as you drill into each space, app, and service. And since we’re agile developers too, it’s getting better with every push to production.
Spring.io: Serving 2 Million Monthly Page Views and 500K Users on PWS
To better understand the impact of this agile platform for agile teams approach, I recently caught up with Chris Beams and Brian Clozel, two of the developers for Spring.io, Pivotal’s production site for the Spring developer community running on PWS. Here’s what they had to say -
Operating the spring.io site on Pivotal Web Services has allowed our small development team to serve 500K unique Spring users and their 2M page views per month with an absolute minimum of fuss. One highlight is the PWS Marketplace, which has made it trivial to run spring.io against a production-grade database and monitoring infrastructure. Even better, we’ve been able to create a very low-maintenance continuous delivery pipeline and achieve simple and reliable zero downtime deployments thanks to Cloud Foundry’s Java buildpack, router architecture, and dedicated Gradle plugin. The Spring team wants to help organizations everywhere build better applications, and we’re proud to offer spring.io running on PWS as a real-world example of what that means.
Here are some additional insights from talking to Chris and Brian I wanted to share with you:
Spring.io serves their 500k users 24×7 with 4x2GB app instances ($172.80/mo) and a dedicated 20 GB Postgres DB from ElephantSQL ($99/mo) in production
There were two main developers responsible for dev and ops, collaborating with a distributed team across 8 locations
Spring.io has had 99.7% uptime over the last month and 99.1% over the last 6 months
When the team merges a GitHub pull request to master, it triggers a TravisCI build using the Cloud Foundry Gradle plugin to automate blue green deployments to prod
They use HipChat to receive operational notifications from Pingdom and CI notifications from TravisCI to create their own virtual NOC with a minimal staff of two developers, with weekend coverage by one devops
Getting Started is Easy
Getting started with Pivotal Web Services takes less than a minute
Enter your email
Click on the “verify your email address” in the auto-generated email
Create your password
Enter a number for SMS verification
Enter SMS verification code and create your first organization
That’s it! You should receive a welcome email with resources to push your first app, scale it, add a service for persistence and tail the logs. To get you started, here are the steps to push your first app
Install the CF CLI
$ cf login -a api.run.pivotal.io
$ git clone https://github.com/cloudfoundry-samples/spring-music
$ cd spring-music/ ; ./gradlew assemble // use ./gradlew.bat on Windows
$ cf push