Going open development

Here is one for the cloud applications development community that exploits new open source technologies to speed up the development process and lead to better resource utilisation.

The announcement comes from Boulder, Colorado-based OnDemand, which has introduced Deis, an open source PaaS for building both public and private cloud services.

Deis is an open source project created and maintained by OpDemand that is hosted and managed on GitHub. All bugs, features and enhancements are tracked publicly, with project planning performed in the open on IRC and using GitHub milestones.

It is designed to allow software teams to deploy and scale almost any application on their own PaaS using a workflow inspired by Heroku, combining Docker’s Linux container engine with infrastructure automation by Chef to create an application platform uniquely designed for developers and operations engineers. The aim is that software teams get the benefits of PaaS and lightweight virtualisation without giving up control of their underlying infrastructure.

Using Docker, applications deployed on Deis run as a series of secure, lightweight processes instead of separate virtual machines. This allows more applications to run on fewer servers, leading to dramatic increases in system utilisation, lower management overhead and decreased costs. Deis makes this possible through open source orchestration technology that automatically builds, distributes and executes Docker containers.

“Deis joins a growing trend of PaaS offerings that are purpose built to take advantage of Docker as a standard for lightweight virtualisation and interoperability,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “The combination of Docker with support for Chef and Heroku-style deployment workflows should make Deis an appealing option for DevOps-minded organisations.”

It helps operations teams use Chef to orchestrate server provisioning across public cloud, private cloud and bare-metal, with servers automatically incorporated into the application fabric where they perform functions for the platform based on Chef recipes. Chef Data Bags provide a highly available, shared data store used to configure the platform, while Opscode’s library of Chef cookbooks makes it easy to deploy databases, messaging, caching and other services for use alongside Deis.

“Deis has only been available for two months. The response from open source developers has been overwhelming,” said Joshua Schnell, CEO of OpDemand. “There is clearly demand for a more flexible approach to open PaaS. The OpDemand team will continue to make Deis better in concert with the open source community. We’re only getting started.”