NTT Communications, World's Leading Telecom, Joins Cloud Foundry Core

As the world’s leading telecom, NTT Communications has experience delivering global cloud services to enterprise customers. Enterprises in Japan are seeking the openness, choice, agility and extensibility that an Open PaaS can provide.

In this guest blog, Hideki Kurihara, Product Lead for NTT Communications’ Global Cloud Services, explains why NTT Communications selected Cloud Foundry as the basis for its Cloudⁿ PaaS and why it chose to join Cloud Foundry Core.

We are excited to join the Cloud Foundry Core community as proof of our commitment to making cloud portability a reality for Japanese developers. As the world’s leading telecom, everyday we see customers interested in using PaaS to be more agile. But we also hear concerns about vendor lock-in and ability to meet the needs of a complex enterprise environment. We chose to build Cloudⁿ PaaS on top of Cloud Foundry because of its multi-cloud nature, ability to integrate with existing assets, and solid API foundation for adding management and monitoring features. Using Cloud Foundry as the base, we are extending Cloudⁿ PaaS for developers and enterprise customers in Japan. Together with other Cloud Foundry Core partners, we are delivering cloud portability to Japanese users as well as global users of Cloud Foundry.

The Drivers for Open PaaS in Japan

The customer community in Japan wants more agility, choice, extensibility and manageability when it comes to cloud. Customers across sectors are looking to innovate faster in response to a very dynamic environment. For example, cloud has been used extensively for emergency infrastructure services in response to recent natural disasters. There has been a sharp increase in demand for cloud services to support smartphone and tablet application development. More global businesses have started considering cloud services as part of their global IT standardization so applications can be ported on demand from one place to another.

Customers here also want choice – choice to add new frameworks and services, and even to port their applications back on-premise or to another provider in Japan and other countries. Enterprises tend to prefer customization to augment their business. But they also value industry or open standards in the services they consume so they can deploy their application assets in the most appropriate place. When it comes to PaaS, application portability needs to be taken more seriously. Open PaaS, that is PaaS based on an open or industry standard, is what customers are talking about here.

Choosing and Building a PaaS Around Cloud Foundry

Meeting the needs of developers and operations for a PaaS that is open, extensible, and easily managed in the enterprise environment is difficult. We chose to build Cloudⁿ PaaS on top of Cloud Foundry specifically because of its:

1) Openness and portability

2) Flexibility – in configuration and ability to integrate with existing enterprise assets and services

3) Extensibility – the ability to add frameworks and services, but even beyond that, to build UI based tools that make it easy to manage and add resources to applications and navigate very large installations

We’ve relied heavily on the open source nature of Cloud Foundry. We have added memcached, our own filesystem service, and support for Java web application servers (Resin/Resin Pro) so our customers’ existing applications can work seamlessly on Cloudⁿ PaaS. But Cloud Foundry Core provides our customers’ developers the choice to use a common floor of runtimes and services when programming their applications. This gives them assurance they can port their applications to a Cloud Foundry Core provider in another geography not served by NTT communications or to a Cloud Foundry instance in their data centers.

Once in their own data centers, customers typically have a heterogeneous mix of infrastructure on which they wish to deploy Cloud Foundry, depending on the SLA and tenancy models. We initially deployed Cloud Foundry on top of our Enterprise Cloud services platform using vSphere and vCloud Director. We use this instance as our own Cloud Foundry development environment and plan to use a similar environment for future enterprise/private PaaS. On the other hand, the public multi-tenant instance of Cloudⁿ PaaS has been deployed on a different cloud platform with attributes and services more tailored for developer centric markets.

Cloud Foundry is designed with sufficient flexibility to satisfy a huge variety of needs for PaaS environments. The Cloud Foundry system consists of several components, and users can set up their environment by choosing the necessary combination and number of components for their needs Fig. 1

Cloud Foundry supports a wide range of environments—from a private PaaS on a single server to a huge public PaaS on a cluster of over a thousand servers—and can be set up to suit the scale as well as its reliability and support features. Moreover, users can add components on demand, so it is possible to start with the minimum configuration and increase the scale as the load grows.

Enterprise integration is one key area where we see area for adding value to our customers on top of Cloud Foundry. The Cloud Foundry services gateway component addresses the ability to add enterprise data services that our customers request for HA, recovery, and backup. The service gateway itself is nothing more than a REST gateway for binding any service, but the real magic is in the service node implementation that allows multi-node deployments for HA and clustering. We are working to create our own multi-node deployments of services using this component such as the aforementioned filesystem and memcached services.

NTT Communications’ Customizations of Cloud Foundry for Enterprises in Japan

Although Cloud Foundry is a promising PaaS software solution that has many good features, as described above, it is still not perfect. For example, integration with other NTT Communications’ services was naturally not provided. Therefore, we have been making efforts to extend Cloud Foundry to meet the specific needs of our enterprise customers and developers in Japan.

Contributions and Customizations to Cloud Foundry

(1) Reliability of Cloud Foundry components

Because Cloud Foundry was a very young project when we started our development, NTT Communications and NTT R&D (Software Innovation Center) have been examining the performance and scalability of Cloud Foundry by conducting various tests and fixing any problems revealed by them. For example, we solved a problem involving an important component that was a single point of failure and a problem where some components could not be restored after failures by fixing the source code and adding additional external systems.

(2) Convenience of Cloud Foundry

Since convenience is important for commercial services, we created an installer for the virtual machine container (VMC), which is the console for PaaS users, and we are now developing a function for linking the VMC and version control systems such as Git.

(3) Control Panel for user application management

Although Cloud Foundry has a flexible component system as described above, it is essential to provide a more user-friendly environment to fully leverage its features. Therefore, we have developed a control panel that allows users to manage their applications on Cloudⁿ PaaS. The control panel displays a list of the user’s applications, information about each application, status of resources for each application instance, and each application’s logs that have been stored by means of Cloudⁿ PaaS services. Using the control panel, operators can flexibly scale-out or scale-up their applications instances. Fig. 2

Building a Cloud Foundry Community in Japan

The presence of active communities is indispensable in the long-term evolution of open source software. We launched the Japan Cloud Foundry Group and are fostering a developers’ and users’ community of Cloud Foundry in Japan. In addition, we will open the source code created by group members by committing them to the official Cloud Foundry repository, and we also provide the know-how in workshops.

About the Author: Hideki Kurihara is the Product Lead for Global Cloud Services, including PaaS, for NTT Communications. Prior to his current position, he was engaged in NTT Communications’ North American hosting and cloud business for 10 years, serving in managerial positions such as General Manager of the Enterprise Hosting business unit and Vice President of Global Product Strategy at its subsidiaries. Hideki holds a Master of Science degree from University of Tokyo in Japan and a Master of Business Administration degree from INSEAD in France.

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