Tanzu Developer Blog
Tyler Britten May 29, 2020
While running software in containers is very popular, it can be a little confusing to figure out the best way to get your code into a container. Now that the industry is mostly unified on Open Container Initiative (OCI) Standard container image formats, they can be built in any number of ways.
Building via Dockerfiles is the most commonly used approach, but there are also other tools that can make it easier with less learning upfront and some other advantages.
Dockerfiles
If you’re not familiar with the specification for Dockerfiles, you can find it here. The basic layout looks something like this:
FROM debian:latest
ADD my-app-file /app/
CMD /app/my-app-file
The first thing we need is a starting point, and in this case, we’re using a debian image, and the latest version. There are also ones that are language-specific like python or golang and ones tied to specific distributions.
The next lines include whatever steps we need to prepare the image, and the last line tells the image what command to run when the image is executed. There are a lot of variations of this but these are the basics. How can we make it better? Well a real application that is a bit more complicated would make this easier. Here’s a very simple golang http server application:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/", func (w http. …
David Dieruf May 21, 2020
Your app is destined for the cloud, but it’s going to meet some challenges along the way. First stop is the always fun whiteboarding session(s). Then come the sticky notes, which inevitably yield a backlog. Only when those two steps are complete does the Zen art of coding begin.
But ask yourself this: While whiteboarding the app’s design, how often is the developer’s local environment considered? Probably never. In fact, I bet during design a local environment doesn’t even make into the afterthoughts. Instead, it’s just one of those “figure it out” things.
Take, for example, the design of a microservice. Most likely it’s going to be dependent on an external configuration, like Spring Config. Ever consider how a developer is going to test on a config server locally? Do they have access to local containerization, like Docker? Or are they left to waste countless hours rigging up environment variables, only to find a totally different schema when the app is pushed to its platform?
I’ve been there and done that. It’s frustrating, wasteful, and breaks one of the most important of the 12 factors: No. 10, parity between environments. It’s also a personal favorite, and one I’ve been known to be ornery about.
The goal is not about following a good or bad design (although there’s plenty of room for bad decisions). It’s about …
Bryan Friedman May 7, 2020
Developers and VMware. The pairing might not make sense to you at first. As an application developer, maybe you have only limited experience working with VMware software. It’s probably just the place where your software runs on-premises. Or it’s the thing you get access to a couple of days after putting in that infrastructure request ticket.
But make no mistake, VMware Tanzu is for you. If you are a developer working in a large enterprise, or even a small- to medium-sized business, you are now being asked to build “modern” applications or to “modernize” your existing apps. VMware Tanzu is a collection of software created expressly to help you with this application modernization effort. It brings together innovations via VMware’s acquisitions of Heptio, Bitnami, Wavefront, and Pivotal with lots of open-source DNA from projects like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. And don’t worry, this site isn’t about infrastructure software like vSphere or NSX. Instead, it covers the topics you need to know to write modern software: Spring, .NET, Python, RabbitMQ, Kafka, CI/CD platforms, and much more.
App modernization
So now you see how a VMware-hosted developer site can be focused on app modernization. But what exactly is meant by “app modernization”? Is it simply the latest in a long line of technology fads that just means more work for you?
It can sometimes feel like that. Change is hard, …