Make Existing Apps Faster, More Scalable, And Cost Effective To Operate With Stacksmith, Kubernetes & Spotinst

Written by Ido Bar Oz, Director Strategic Partnerships at Spotinst

Kubernetes is one of the hottest topics in the IT industry at the moment. As you have learned in Spotinst’s previous blog post about the state of the Kubernetes ecosystem, many companies offer solutions around container-orchestration. In this blog post you will learn how to use Bitnami Stacksmith to package an application for Kubernetes, then leverage Spotinst’s Elastigroup to reduce compute costs, while maintaining high availability of that application as it runs on your Kubernetes cluster.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes was born from a need to run cloud-native applications on a massively scaled network, and that’s exactly what it enables its growing user base to do. The demand for platforms that can run web-scalable workloads means Kubernetes is increasingly under consideration by IT engineering teams, and many are choosing to adopt it.

Bitnami Stacksmith – Automating Application Packaging and Simplifying DevOps

Bitnami Stacksmith removes the complexity associated with packaging and maintaining your applications for today’s cloud and container platforms. Stacksmith does this by utilizing sophisticated tooling and automation that Bitnami has developed over its many years packaging open-source applications and run time environments for all the major cloud providers.   Supply your application code and scripts, select the appropriate template and a few parameters, and hit create. Stacksmith then automates the packaging of your application, optimizes it for your target, and delivers everything you will need to deploy it.

But the benefits of Stacksmith don’t stop when the application is deployed. During the packaging process, Stacksmith documents the components and dependencies that go into your application.  Armed with this, Stacksmith continuously monitors trusted sites for new releases and security updates to these components, and alerts you when they become available. It also provides a simple way to re-package your application to incorporate the updates, to ensure your applications stay up-to-date and secure. 

Stacksmith is an end-to-end tool that automates and simplifies development and IT operations tasks associated with packaging and maintaining your applications for the cloud. 

Kubernetes and Stacksmith

Bitnami Stacksmith works by providing a set of pre-defined application architectures using “templates”. When packaging applications for Kubernetes, Stacksmith will create a Helm chart and a container with all the necessary dependencies for that application. This means that customers can deploy Kubernetes applications in a matter of minutes, and are able to enjoy all the benefits of Kubernetes without having to go through the complex task of containerizing their environment themselves.

Containerization Simplified – What’s the Next Step?

Using Stacksmith can help to alleviate the complexities surround creating a Kubernetes environment, but once the environment is created, what comes next? Often, managing the underlying infrastructure of Kubernetes workloads can be an unwelcome, complex and time-consuming task. Spotinst Managed Container Service (MCS) can remove this unnecessary demand on developer teams.

Spotinst MCS allows customers to run their containerized environments without having to think about the infrastructure layer of servers their containers are running on. MCS provisions, manages and scales infrastructure underneath various containerized environments, including Kubernetes. With Spotinst MCS’s simple import process, all that is needed to migrate Kubernetes workloads to the Spotinst platform is to import the ASG that was created by Stacksmith into Spotinst Elastigroup.

Through dynamically scaling infrastructure and smart container packing to fit the need of customer workloads, MCS doesn’t only automate the infrastructure management but also considerably improve the efficiency of the environments.

Spotinst MCS smart scaling activities:

• Headroom – a buffer of spare capacity (in terms of memory and CPU) will be provisioned to make sure that there is no need to wait for new instances when scaling up whilst simultaneously ensuring instances won’t become over-utilized.
• Smart Scaling Down – Spotinst Elastigroup will monitor the cluster for idle instances which remain underutilized for a specified amount of consecutive periods. Once identified, MCS will find spare capacity in other instances, drain those instance tasks and reschedule those on other instances before terminating the idle instance.
• Tetris Scaling – Elastigroup records the events written when an Kubernetes task is pending and analyzes why they are yet to be started (i.e. Insufficient Memory / CPU, No Ports Available, etc.). It will then spin up instances inside the customer’s cluster to accommodate for the incoming tasks.

Cost Reduction for Spotinst MCS

Spotinst MCS doesn’t only fully automate the provisioning and managing of the underlying infrastructure for Kubernetes environments, it also significantly reduces their costs – by as much as 80%. Spotinst MCS utilizes Spotinst Elastigroup technology to spin up the infrastructure on Spot Instances instead of On-Demand Instances, reducing costs by as much as 80% whilst utilizing predictive analytics to ensure availability.

Spotinst Elasitgroup uses both real-time and historical data to predict Spot Instance terminations or price increases and, once these events are predicted, Elastigroup will preemptively and seamlessly migrate customer workloads to a different Spot Instance of either another instance type or across AZs. If no suitable Spot Instance is found, Elastigroup will automatically fall-back to On-Demand Instances, meaning that customers can enjoy a 70-80% cost reduction whilst still enjoying a 99.99% SLA – the same SLA as provided by AWS.

Through using Bitnami Stacksmith to deploy containerized environments and Spotinst MCS to handle the instance management for the containers, you can spin-up containers and have them running with significant cost reductions all without increasing demand on your developer teams. To see this process in action, you can register for Bitnami and Spotinst’s joint webinar here!

Original post located here.

Bitnami Stacksmith - Cloud Migration Made Simple

Authored by Michael Murphy, Product Marketing Manager

Bitnami is pleased to announce the official release of Stacksmith, our enterprise application migration solution.

Stacksmith has been in the works for the last year or so, but it builds on Bitnami’s extensive experience in application packaging that goes back much further. In fact, Stacksmith is a productization of the tooling and automation that Bitnami uses internally to package and maintain the catalog of about 120 open source applications that it publishes to all the major cloud marketplaces. And just like our application catalog, packaging an application in Stacksmith ensures an easy-to-use, ready-to-run and always up to date application...only in this case, it’s your internal custom application.

Stacksmith let's enterprise companies leverage Bitnami’s application packaging experience and automation when they repackage their custom and legacy applications and move them to a public or private cloud platform. 

There are two key points that I want to focus on in this blog post. Taken together, they significantly differentiate Stacksmith from other application migration solutions. They are:

• Stacksmith is easy to use
• Stacksmith gets you all the way there

Let’s look at each in a bit more detail.

Stacksmith is easy to use

Consider the following:

• You don’t have to have a sophisticated internal software development team in place to use Stacksmith – our step by step approach walks you through the process. 
• You don’t have to have lots of cloud knowledge or experience to use Stacksmith – Bitnami’s extensive experience packaging for all the major cloud provider platforms means that this knowledge is built in. The Stacksmith templates bring in all the components required by the target platform, as well as best practices. 
• You don’t have to edit or alter your application source code – you can replatform it as-is with Stacksmith. So even if the original developers of the application have long since moved on, you can still migrate the application with confidence. 
• Keeping your replatformed application up to date moving forward becomes super easy – Stacksmith automates the ongoing maintenance tasks associated with keeping applications up to date, a challenge many companies face with their legacy applications in the datacenter today.

Replatforming with Stacksmith takes about the same effort as rehosting (aka ‘lifting & shifting’) your application. Yet it delivers on automation and other cloud-native benefits that you will want to utilize on your new cloud platform - rehosting does not. And rehosting solutions deliver as output a VM or container – but you need more than just that to deploy to your new platform. Which brings me nicely to the second point…

Stacksmith gets you all the way there

Stacksmith is designed to deliver a complete application migration experience for enterprises. It doesn’t only deliver part of the migration toolchain experience – Stacksmith gives you everything you need to complete the replatforming process. This is a significant departure from many other solutions in the market that simply build a container or virtual machine - but still require you to create the deployment template needed for the new platform. Creating those templates requires cloud and platform specific knowledge.

Stacksmith takes a running application in the traditional datacenter, repackages it, and delivers a running application in the public or private cloud. Boom - application migrated. And the extensive Bitnami experience means that all the required components for your application to run on its new platform, as well as platform best practices, are built in to the process and get included with your new application package - we know what each platform requires so you don’t have to.

Find out for yourself. We created a host of new assets for this launch, including:

• A completely refreshed Bitnami website
• New Stacksmith product and solution pages on the new Bitnami.com site
• A whitepaper titled ‘Optimizing Applications for Cloud Migration’
• A Stacksmith 30 day Trial - come try it out!
• A Stacksmith Demo Video
• A series of enterprise blog posts that explore a number of application migration topics and challenges
• Stacksmith documentation 

If you have been waiting for a ‘better solution’ to assist with your digital transformation initiative, now you have it! Use Stacksmith to get those legacy applications migrated to cloud, private or public. 

Oh and if you like what you see, help us spread the word!

How Replatforming Applications Fits in with Modern DevOps Practices

Authored by Matt Small, Head of Customer Success

DevOps is a loaded term. Some would tell you that unless you are completely re-architecting your applications and continuously deploying production microservices to your private PaaS 100 times per day, you are not doing “DevOps”. However in essence, DevOps is about creating a culture of cooperation between Developers and the Operations team, and reducing the gap between the development process and any operational issues of software running in production, Technology plays a role: automation tools should be used to accelerate and scale repeatable processes and reduce the frequency and possibilities for human error; monitoring of the application and infrastructure should be leveraged to create a feedback loop; and source control and chat tools form a common foundation for humans and machines to collaborate.

A problem arises when you look at enterprise applications in the datacenter that were not developed with these cultural and technological ideals in mind. These applications are likely foundational to the business, but so is the need to modernize and move forward with cloud and container migrations. Enterprises are led to believe that they will either have to leave these applications behind (either technologically, by leaving them in the datacenter, or culturally by performing a simple lift-and-shift to a commensurate IaaS platform), or undertake costly application re-architecture projects. Fortunately, there is a DevOps Middle Way: replatform those applications by packaging your existing code with cloud native best practices.

Replatforming applications allows you to modernize the infrastructure. Continuing to use your application code on a modern cloud platform means you get the benefits of rapid provisioning and scaling of resources, and op-ex run rates over cap-ex guesses. You can finally get yourself out of the datacenter business.

Unfortunately, replatforming typically requires some level of application code change, so enterprises are left with a lingering questions: what are these “best practices” that we need to adopt to conform to our cloud or container platform of choice, and how do they impact our application code (how and where do I have to change my source code)?

Bitnami is developing a better approach to replatforming that answers these questions. It incorporates our deep experience in packaging applications and deploying hundreds of stacks across all the major public and private cloud and container platforms. This tool understands and interprets the requirements and best practices needed to make the best use of the target platform, allowing you to re-platform your application without having to make underlying code changes and without having any deep knowledge of the platform you are packaging the application for.

Cloud topologies differ from the datacenter, and Bitnami’s tool guides the adoption of crucial capabilities such as persistent volume storage, highly available Database-a-a-Service offerings and secure virtual private cloud networking to ensure applications can be successfully re-platformed. You can readily extend these capabilities to use other cloud-native features and Platform-as-a-Service features as you require--Bitnami places no limitations on what services you use or how, and we don’t abstract you away from the underlying innovations coming from those providers.

Bitnami also packages our best practices on how to run different frameworks in the cloud. For example, one of our reference architectures for Java configures Tomcat to use the JNDI connection pool for MySQL out-of-the box, making your application a lot more resource efficient and less likely to hit connection limits. Of course, everything is customizable so you can implement your own enterprise best practices and application requirements.

This new tool will make it possible to wrap an application written a decade or more ago in a set of scripts that both Dev and Ops can understand, collaborate on, and extend the functionality of. Culturally, you will be adopting an application-centric view of infrastructure. By investing in defining your application explicitly--where the code is, what dependencies it has, and how it’s meant to be started--you are taking one of the most important steps toward modernizing your deployment, a key pillar of DevOps practices.

Taking the first step by using Bitnami to package your code with our cloud- and container-optimized best practices will help you migrate quickly and begin enjoying the benefits of the cloud or container service. Congratulations, you’re now doing operations through development--DevOps!

Let Bitnami empower your successful cloud migration. Our new replatforming tool will be available soon. If you are interested in finding out more, let us know at https://bitnami.com/enterprise and we’ll be happy to schedule a demo.