Today’s topic is programming tools and environments. I’ve moved back into enterprise-land for the last year and getting back up to speed on all of the complexities of working with the Microsoft web development stack, combined with a bunch of tomcat java systems, mixed in with powershell scripts for managing package deployments and so on.
Combined with this I’m watching the stunning complexity of working and maintaining code in these environments and thought I should get back on the learning Ruby on Rails personal project that had been back burnered for a while. This was prompted by the nascent discussions about moving stuff into the “cloud”. Of course no discussion can happen in the enterprise today without the cloud intruding on it somewhere.
In order to be able to help orient the discussion and ensure that people are using the same language I went out to do a quick tour of the current state of the “cloud” as it could be useful to me. I’ve been doing VMware deployments for a number of years now and the whole Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stuff is old hat. Unfortunately most enterprises view on the cloud is exactly that, except that they want it offered by a service provider with a simple monthly bill so they can ask for capacity on the fly without actually having to plan for anything. While that approach certainly has some merits for people higher up the IT food chain, it doesn’t really change anything fundamental about how applications get developed, are deployed and maintained. The bottom line is the same ugly application stack managed in virtual machines that are no longer stored locally.
The cool stuff that I saw were the new Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings that are finally coming into their own with viable private an hybrid platform solutions. I’m not interested in using anything that locks me into a given provider and I want to be able to run stuff internally as well as externally. This led me to VMware’s Cloud Foundry and the Stackato and Iron Foundy offshoots. Stackato is from the folks over at Active State who have been around for quite a while and are firmly living in the open space, while Iron Foundry is the .Net variation on the Cloud Foundry stack. The latest news is that Stackato now offers .Net integration as well, which is a very good thing for enterprise clients who often require a support contract and are leery of community supported tools.
Looking over the basic toolkits and architectures, this is just so much cleaner that the current mess of web.config, properties.xml, controllers.xml, managers.xml, … ad_nauseum.xml which prompted me to get my ass in gear and start learning Ruby on Rails (again).