whitepaper general stackato

8/10/2019 Whitepaper General Stackato

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Private PaaS for the Agile EnterpriseEmpower your Cloud with Private Platform-as-a-Service Technology from ActiveState


2/10 www.activestate.comStackato: Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise

Empower your Cloud with Private Platform-as-a-Service Technology fr om ActiveState ActiveState Software Inc. Published in 2013. Originally published in 2013

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Stackato : Private PaaS for the Agile EnterpriseEmpower your Cloud with Private Platform-as-a-ServiceTechnology from ActiveState

If you already use virtualized infrastructure, you are well on your way to leveraging the powerof the cloud. Virtualization o ers the promise of limitless resources, but how do you managethat scalability when your DevOps team doesnt scale? In todays hypercompetitive markets,

fast results can make a di erence between leading the pack vs. obsolescence. Organizationsneed more bene ts from cloud computing than just raw resources. They need agility, exibility,convenience, ROI, and control.

Stackato private Platform-as-a-Service technology from ActiveState extends your private cloudinfrastructure by creating a private PaaS to provide on-demand availability, exibility, control,and ultimately, faster time-to-market for your enterprise.

The Challenge: Deliver on the Promise of the CloudYouve virtualized. Thats great! But where are the exibility, agility, control, and ROI that youneed? Why hasnt the cloud delivered on its promise of a new world order? The problem is one ofexcess. You have 10,000 new VMs and all this fantastic/cheap computing power, but whos going tomanage it all? Your cloud has only partially delivered on its promise with many in the organizationstill looking for answers:

IT teams need control and scalability. You serve the needs of various internal and externalcustomers, and your time is valuable. You now also have a lot of new computing resources tomanage, but you dont scale like cloud infrastructure! Those management requests are only goingto grow in volume and complexity. You need an e cient way to manage your systems withoutsacri cing control and oversight.

Developers need fexibility. You create products. You dont want to be concerned withprovisioning services, deployment processes, or IT systems. You want to code! You want to createproducts and services that just work. No more ddling with environments, praying stu works inproduction, and playing tag with IT. You need the exibility to develop in the language thats bestsuited to the job, in an environment that fosters innovation and creativity.

CIOs need e ciency. Youve invested in cloud infrastructure and now need to start seeing returns.You not only want productivity gains, e ciency improvements, and ROI, but you also want to seethe impact on your organizations innovation and creativity. At the end of the day, its not about thetools and systems, but what they help facilitate and enable.




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The Solution: Stackato Platform-as-a-Service TechnologyMany organizations lack the IT resources to maintain multiple technology platforms or stacks. Theyusually standardize on a single technology stack such as a Linux distribution, with limited choiceslike Ruby, Java, MySQL, or Apache Tomcat. As a result, developers are forced to design applicationswith these constraints.

Stackato private PaaS technology from ActiveState lifts these limitations, allowing developersto choose the best cloud stack for their applications. By auto-con guring and self-provisioningthe services required, Stackato makes it easy for IT to support multiple technology stacks, givingdevelopers the exibility they need. Organizations can easily develop, test, deploy, host, andmaintain applications without the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the underlyinghardware and software.

Public Versus Private PaaS

Enterprises with strict policies or compliance requirements use private clouds to leverage the sameadvantages o ered by public clouds while providing additional security, control, and customizationcapabilities. Public-cloud PaaS can serve many enterprise cloud needs, but the public PaaS o eringscarry signi cant drawbacks:

Lack of choice: most public PaaS o erings limit use to speci c languages, applicationframeworks, and con guration, so enterprise users have to conform to strict, in exibleguidelines.Does each application require speci c scripts and middleware components?

Forget those legacy apps: public PaaS o erings are typically designed for newapplications and dont provide the ability to migrate existing application data.

Not as secure: most public PaaS o erings are secure. But the shared tenancy model is onlyas safe as its tenants weakest vulnerability. Also, putting con dential corporate and customerdata on a public cloud leaves it out of your control. This potential vulnerability requires ahigh degree of con dence that public providers can keep data isolated and protected.

When it comes to the public cloud, you need to ask several questions:

Can you verify the security of your application and data?

Can you modify and scale to suit the growing needs of your development team?

How is it integrating with internal infrastructure and data?

Does it comply with regulatory standards for privacy?

Can you migrate and manage existing web applications?

The primary di erentiator of a private cloud is that it operates exclusively for a speci c organization,managed either by the organization itself or by a third party, and software applications can besecurely deployed behind the corporate rewall. A private cloud gives you full control over yoursystems, customer data, your own data, and your level of security and compliance.




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vSphere, XenServer, and other virtualization platforms allow you to more e ciently use yourserver farms, dramatically lowering IT costs and streamlining system administration. They helpyou provision IT-as-a-Service so you can create self-service on-demand infrastructure to increaseproductivity, improve hardware utilization, and reduce costs. However, your DevOps teams dontscale and need help managing all of this new, raw virtualized computing power. This is whereStackato shines.

Why You Need Stackato Private PaaS TechnologyA private PaaS is an application platform that works on top of your private IaaS or private cloudinfrastructure, exclusively for your enterprise. It enables developers to leverage all the bene ts ofa public PaaS (on-demand availability, fast deployment, elasticity) to deploy, manage, and monitorapplications, and also meet the security, privacy, and compliance requirements enterprisesdemand.

With a private PaaS, applications share infrastructure resources (instances) with other applications,but each one is isolated via secure multi-tenant containerization so that one doesnt adversely a ectthe system or other applications. Other bene ts include:

Flexibility. Developers can develop in whichever language is best for the task at hand, withoutbeing restricted by IT resources. They can also self-serve and easily deploy applications themselves,eliminating IT bottlenecks. An infrastructure-agnostic PaaS enables organizations to shift theirIT strategy as needed and ensure that their IT infrastructure will be able to support them.

Security. Breaches of public websites are regularly reported in the media, and whilemost estimates of their costs are anecdotal, the resulting nancial damages fororganizations can be extremely serious. A private PaaS is exclusive to your enterpriseand less vulnerable to such attacks. The privacy this o ers is critical since sensitiveinformation is securely kept within the con nes and control of the company.

Control. While allowing developers to deploy their own applications to the cloud through apublic PaaS saves IT signi cant overhead, you also want to ensure that development teamsconform to corporate standards and policies. A private PaaS gives you control over how

developers push applications to the cloud. DevOps teams have a simple and straightforwardweb interface that allows them to easily see what is happening on all their systems.




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The Solution: StackatoActiveState Stackato extends your private cloud infrastructure by creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to provide on-demand availability, exibility, control, and ultimately, faster time-to-market for your enterprise.

With Stackato, enterprise IT enjoys rapid application deployment, scalable administration, assuredcompliance, and greater control. Developers can code in the language thats right for them andseamlessly launch applications to any cloud. For the enterprise, that means faster time to market,better productivity, cost savings, and greater innovation.

Stackato: a pre-con gured cloud application platform with multiple choices

Stackato has enabled a level of empowerment for our developers that previously was not possible.Instead of quickly developing apps and then running into the brick wall of IT backlogs, developers canliterally run with their apps straight to the cloud. Easily, safely, and quickly.

Dale McCrory, Principal Product Manager, ExactTarget




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The Stackato ImpactStackatos impact can be felt beyond IT. The di erence it makes to an enterprises productivity,e ciency, and ROI can be felt in all parts of the company.

Agility

Stackato reduces the amount of time spent on IT con guration and helps you get your applicationsto market faster. With Stackato, your developers can easily test in a production environment,self-serve, and get apps to the production cloud in minutes, not weeks. And that saves you time,resources, and money.

Freedom of Choice

Stackato provides your enterprise with the freedom of choice and exibility to choose whicheverdata service, language, or web framework that works best for each of your applications. Deployinstantly to the cloud of your choice (private, public, or hybrid), on any infrastructure stack, and runyour business the way you want.

Scalable Management

Stackatos intuitive web-based management console UI lets you scale your applications to growas usage grows, delivering the performance your end-users demand. Stackato o ers centralizedcluster administration, dynamic load balancing, elastic scalability, persistent le-system sharing, andconsolidated logging.

Stackato is designed for the mission-critical operations of a large enterprise but can also easily scaleto the needs of individual developers on smaller projects. Start with the Stackato Micro Cloud, and

then cluster to take advantage of the built-in auto-scaling, as your usage increases.

Cost-savings/ROI

Stackato saves you time and money, and allows you to get your application to market faster byenabling an IT-as-a-Service model that features automatic middleware con guration and scalingcapabilities.

Innovation

Stackato automates the con guration, deployment, and management of applications. Your teamno longer needs to worry about infrastructure resources and middleware con guration. Stackatoenables a fast and simple test environment for all your innovative ideas.

SecurityStackato delivers secure, compliant control over sensitive data and applications. With the StackatoFence subsystem, application instances are enveloped in their own secure virtual container (LXC).This allows applications to be fully isolated from each other while protecting the host operatingsystem and ensuring that CPU and memory limits are strictly enforced. The Stackato Harbor PortService enables users to deploy network applications using protocols other than HTTP(S), andtake advantage of multiple SSL certi cates. And Stackato o ers extensible AOK authentication forexternal services like LDAP.




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PortabilityStackato is infrastructure-agnostic, and can easily move applications between public, private, orhybrid cloud environments.

How Does it Work?Stackato deploys each application to virtual servers, automatically setting up everything anapplication requires to runweb server, database, language interpreter, web framework,prerequisite modulesvirtually eliminating IT con guration time. By providing self-serve choicesalong with data migration tools, developers are able to get applications to market faster withStackato. Heres a quick look at the Stackato architecture:

Message Bus (NATS)

DatabasesMessaging

ServicesFile

Systems

Services

DEA(s)(Droplet Execution Agents)

Web UsersMonitoring Deploy & Upgrade

CloudController

Health Manager

Controller

Stager

HTTP(S) HTTPS

TCP

Router

> Client

Stackato scales your applications to grow as usage grows, delivering the performance your end-users demand. Stackatos Health Manager keeps a record of what hosts are hosting which DEA (thenode an application resides in), so it can balance the load on all available hosts, without overloadingany single one. If an additional DEA is required, Stackato can automatically add more in vSphere,EC2, or OpenStack environments.

Stackato also allows additional Cloud Controllers, Routers, and Stagers to be added and usedas high availability failover safety nets or as load balancers to remove potential bottlenecks andimprove performance and reliability. (For a more detailed explanation of the architecture andapplication deployment process, please refer to ActiveStates Stackato Architecture whitepaper.)




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A Diverse, Multi-Choice Cloud Application PlatformIt is noweasy to provision and manage diverse technology ecosystems on your virtualizedinfrastructure rather than conforming to rigid, standardized stacks. With Stackato, developmentteams can deploy new applications, or migrate existing applications to the cloud, and automaticallyprovision an application environment with your choice of languages and frameworks, includingmodule/package dependencies. Each developer also has the freedom to choose the database thatis best for each application.

Developers can mix and match frameworks and databases to t the needs of the application,rather than trying to make the application work with the pre-ordained stack because it is so costlyto support a diversity of technology ecosystems. They can develop applications for various uses onmany platform stacks. Whether they need Python or Java, MySQL, or MongoDB, they are free to pick

the best tools for the job.Stackato automatically con gures application environments, virtually eliminating the t ime ITand DevOps spend on con guration and dependency management when preparing for clouddeployment. Stackato installs and sets up everything an application requires to runweb server,database, language interpreter, web framework, and prerequisite modulesthen deploys theapplication to as many server instances as required. Now thats freedom for IT and developmentteams.

An End-to-End Development Platform

Code, debug, test, and deploy directly from the desktop to the cloud using ActiveStates Komodo

IDE. The Stackato client o ers all the functionality of CloudFoundrys vmc client, with additionalfunctionality for running server-side commands and accessing databases services in the Stackatocloud. If you choose to use Komodo IDE, you can test and debug applications in the environmentthat they will be deployed.

Identical test (micro cloud) and production environments eliminate the constant back and forth withIT. Developers can easily move applications from desktop to production, and be sure that what theydevelop and test will work. No more wasted productivity and no more development backlogs.

Simplified Application Lifecycle and Data Migration Management

Stackato includes enterprise-ready staging and updating processes to ensure your production

application updates and migrations have minimal downtime. With Stackato, you can easily seedyour applications databases, and extract and back-up from databases.

You can migrate and deploy applications in a few simple steps. Administrators can easily replicatecon gurations of existing application environments, and then use the Stackato application updateand data migration functionality to move new, existing, legacy or third-party applications to thecloud with minimal re-engineering.




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The Stackato client o ers all the functionality expected of a vmc clone, with additional commandsto migrate existing applications and data, and for executing server-side commands necessary fordeploying certain applicationssuch as Django and other web frameworks.

From mission-critical behemoths to throwaway scripts, Stackato simpli es application lifecyclemanagement with tools and processes designed for portability.

Dynamic Load Balancing and Elastic Scalability

Once your application is pushed to the cloud, Stackato scales the application as necessary toautomatically grow as usage grows.

The application can be distributed across multiple instances (even in di erent data centers) for

load balancing, redundancy, and to ensure up-time and availability. Every component in your stackis protected by health checks and automated fail-over.You can also modify memory and instanceallocation for all your applications using the Stackato client.

Stackatos elastic scalability delivers the performance your end-users demand.

An Application Platform for Your Hypervisor of Choice

Stackato is a hardened, enterprise-ready version of Cloud Foundry, so you dont need to workthrough various minor but time-consuming details that make the di erence between open sourceand commercial-grade software.

Installation is easy. The server-side Stackato components are packaged as a virtual machine thatcan be run as a stand-alone micro cloud instance, or cloned across a cluster as special-purposenodes (controller, router, data services, and execution agents).

Enterprise-ready means Stackato works seamlessly with the worlds leading cloud infrastructure,to ensure your application automatically and elastically scales to meet the demands of your mostpopular applications. Run Stackato on your hypervisor of choice, then manage and monitor usingthat systems tools for centralized control and visibility at every level of virtual infrastructure.

Stackato also works with cloud application monitoring services such as New Relic (included withStackato) to ensure your applications are meeting your service and performance standards. As areal-time application performance dashboard, New Relic provides immediate insight from the end-users behavior down to the line of code.

Stackato [has] a deployment and operations layer that o ers the exibility we need to rapidlyupdate our web software. Stackatos clustering model has enabled us to deliver a stable and scalablecon guration...Into this environment, weve deployed our blog sites Content Management System(CMS), which is built on Drupal.

Matt Butcher, HPCS


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About ActiveStateActiveState empowers innovation from code to cloud smarter, safer, and faster. ActiveStates cutting-edge solutions give developers and enterprises the power and exibility todevelop in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js, PHP, Tcl, and more. Stackato is ActiveStates groundbreaking cloud platform for creating a private platform as a service (PaaS), and is thecost-e ective, secure, and portable way to develop and deploy apps to the cloud. ActiveState is proven for the enterprise: More than two million developers and 97% of Fortune-1000companies use ActiveStates end-to-end solutions to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications. Global customers like Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, andLockheed Martin look to ActiveState to save time, save money, minimize risk, ensure compliance, and reduce time to market.

2013 ActiveState Software Inc. All rights reserved. ActiveState , Komodo ,, ActivePerl, ActivePython and Stackato are trademarks or registered trademarks of ActiveState. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

ActiveState Software Inc.

1700-409 Granville Street Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2 Canada

[email protected]

Phone: +1.778.786.1100

Fax: +1.778.786.1133Toll-free in North America: 1.866.631.4581

Dont Get Left BehindEnterprises around the world are realizing the bene ts of adopting Stackatos private-PaaStechnology. The impacts are not minimal:

E ciency: be the enterprise of tomorrow and free yourself from the shackles of yourinfrastructure. Your systems should not hinder or constrain your business, but help yourorganization grow. Cut your application deployment times from weeks to minutes; see what trueproductivity can do for your enterprise.

Agility: the businesses that survive are the ones that are exible and nimble in responding tochanging market and customer needs. If you need to move to a hybrid cloud, Stackato can easilysupport that the shift with its portability and infrastructure-agnostic capabilities. If you need to

code in Ruby in addition to Java, Stackato has that capability built-in. An agile enterprise is one thatsidesteps roadblocks and moves towards the future.

Innovation: e ciency and agility lead to innovation. Once teams are freed from the daily burdensof administration and con guration, they can actually focus on moving your business forward.They are able to easily prototype, test, and launch multiple new advancements, without sacri cingcontrol or oversight. Lowered cost of mistakes and increased experimentation is the lastinghallmark of private PaaS.

Enterprise clouds that employ Stackato private PaaS technology o er the e ciency, exibility, andconvenience of a public cloud combined with the security, control, and compliance of a privatecloud. This allows for more freedom and exibility, while saving time and money in developmentcosts, which in turn increases team productivity and fosters greater innovation. From the desktopto the datacenter, Stackato makes it easy to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage, and monitorapplications on any cloud.

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