Ashish Garg talks about “Adobe ColdFusion 2020 Roadmap (Multi-cloud, micro-services and more), with Ashish Garg” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.
Contents
- Show notes
- CF 2020 Roadmap – modernized ColdFusion for the next decade
- Cloud
- CF makes multi-cloud easy
- CF cloud licensing
- Monitoring
- Logging
- Container support
- Installation
- Language
- Cloud Skills
- Services
- Configuration
- Serverless
- Conclusion
- Mentioned in this episode
- Listen to the Audio
- Bio
- Links
- Interview transcript
- Join the CF Alive revolution
Show notes
ColdFusion Future
- PM → VM → Cloud → Containers → Serverless
What will make CF take off more
- CF 2020 Vision – To be the modernized platform of choice for building cloud-native microservice applications with an absolute focus on ease of use without getting locked to a particular cloud vendor (multi-cloud).
- Multi-cloud
- Micro-services container deploy
CF 2020 Roadmap – modernized ColdFusion for the next decade
- Compare to the move from CF5 to CFMX J2EE
- That enabled Enterprise java development using CF
- Now cloud
Cloud
- Most enterprises are moving to the cloud
- Why is cloud so important to enterprises and CIOs?
- Less upfront cost
- CapEx vs OpEx
- Pay monthly vs up front.
- Computing as a utility vs investment in build and maintaining, specialization of server building and maintenance (including security patching, upgrades), better redundancy
- And more flexibility for having to know how many servers you need up front – or change the number of servers day to day, minute to minute.
- Better for the budget – more predictable
- CapEx vs OpEx
- Faster time to market, less work on maintaining servers. Easier to manage
- Managed services – including software
- Many extra services available via the cloud
- Eg database as a service
- Sizing, no downtime or maintenance
- No need for DBA (apart from database design)
- 40+ AWS services
- Backup is taken care of for you
- CF will provide easy access to key cloud services – See Services section below
- The old distributed vs centralized debate
- Easier to scale
- Reliability
- Better but now centralized so when it does go down it affects everything
- AWS went down
- Multi-cloud, multi-region deployment
- Multi-cloud – better features or implementation on certain cloud providers
- Eg HIPPA compliance easier on Azure
- Better regional availability, government restrictions on US and EU govt sites
- Can start small for development then easily scale (both in how beefy the machine is and number of machines in the cluster)
- Less upfront cost
CF makes multi-cloud easy
- AWS
- Azure
- Combined AWS and Azure make up ⅔ of the cloud market for CFers currently
- Other cloud vendors coming in future
- Cloud platform-agnostic – portability
- Portability layer so CFers can write this for new cloud providers as DO
- How fast can it move to a new cloud
- Depends on how the app is written. Containers make this easier. Full-blown cloud app needs abstraction layer. Database provisioning may take time.
- AWS cloud formation template to make a new one
CF cloud licensing
- Moving to cloud licensing (granularly pay per hour/minute)
- Rakshith working on this
- Technical issues are easier to solve
- Free Intro pricing for developers compare to AWS – Freemium marketing – low barrier to entry
- CF AWS already has hourly pricing – AMI
Monitoring
- Monitoring, security and scaling built-in
- Performance Monitoring Toolset (PMT) will be transformed to be cloud/container ready – Monitoring of cloud services
- Messaging and alerts of performance issues
- AWS cloud watch integration
- Centralized performance monitoring of cluster (Virtual Private Cloud = VPC)
- Auto-scaling? Kubanetics or ECS orchestration of containers
- Move to serverless
- Calls going out, coming back, performance metrics of cloud services
Logging
- All logging to be sent to a centralized repo across all the nodes. The idea is to make log inspection for debugging across your nodes and microservices super simple.
- Possible new dedicated logging service and integration with existing logging services such as Splunk
- API Manager logging, control and monitoring of API use will move into cloud too
Container support
- Why – move from monolith apps to REST-based API microservice apps and granular runtime modules
- Lean and small code, more efficient use of computing resources
- Fast loading
- Granular roll back to an earlier version of service API
- Better QA because can test each microservice separately
- More agile, safe to take more risks
- CI/CD pipeline
- Fast deployment
- API manager and microservices
- a hidden CF advantage
- Some future improvements to API manager have been made
- For cloud compatible
- Run on the cloud with common Redis caching in your VPC
Installation
- Nimble runtimes
- Download a tiny zip containing a core base and a package manager – instead of the present 1 GB installer. From 1 GB to less than 50 MB.
- May not have an installer GUI
- Easier container creation for average developers
- Speed of loading/startup time 5 seconds or less
- Similar to NPM = Node Package Manager
- Auto-scaling of code to see what tags are used
- Great for microservice code that
- Could it auto pull in any extra code at runtime?
- DevOps – Tool to scan ColdFusion app and infer CF modules that are required
- App + dependencies to build/create CF Runtime and Docker image
- Integrate with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins to host the build/Docker image and host it on the cloud
- Container – Fully scriptable Docker container to programmatically configure all the settings needed
- Full modularity to create a micro container including just the modules that the microservice/application needs
Language
- “CFScript 2.0”
- We will have an ECMA Script compliant CFScript version that fully resolves the script syntax issues that we saw previously.
- Availability of developers – easier to hire programmers who understand JavaScript
- Polyglot programming – creating apps in multiple languages
- Frontend in Angular, React or Vue with backend in CF – similar language
- Why React and Node became popular because language is similar
- Backward compatibility with prior CFScript version
Cloud Skills
- 94% of IT managers find hiring clouds skills very hard
- There is a huge upside for you ColdFusion developers out there too. According to the OpsRamp cloud skill survey, 94% of the IT decision-makers find it difficult to hire cloud-native and multi-cloud operators. So we are not just talking about a cloud skill gap, it is a cloud skill crisis. With the future version of ColdFusion, all you ColdFusion developers will be upskilled to become competent cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the ease of use that ColdFusion has to offer – with this CF developers will be amidst the cloud technology that has a huge skill gap. You can call yourselves cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the vision that we have set of ourselves.
- Compare to move to Java with CF 6 – making Enterprise developer
Services
- On AWS and Azure, you will be able to use a common API interface across clouds to access
- Storage eg S3
- Database RDS, Azure SQL
- NoSQL
- Caching Eslatic Cache, Redis?
- Messages/notifications SQS, push notifications
- All this in less than 1/4th the code needed, say in Java using the Java SDK.
- EC2, ECS
- Serverless support?
- Why: ease of coding, Multicloud
- Can use Extra services – use in a cloud-aware way – but lack of portability – via REST so easy to call from CF. Expose Java SDK?
Configuration
- The idea is to ease the configuration of servers or containers and applications in one centralized server. You no longer have to deal with CAR or migrate settings from one server to another through a manual copy of files. Everything will be taken care of by this centralized configuration using which you can push changes to all or some of your servers/containers/applications.
- DevOps easier – scriptable deployment
Serverless
- Tool to build CF runtime to deploy your serverless code on Amazon Lamda or Azure function.
- All this happens across AWS and Azure to begin with. We will be a true multi-cloud solution.
- Key is a small runtime and fast startup of CF
- Ideally needs CF licensing on a per-second basis
Conclusion
- We are supercharged with this vision. And we really hope you are as charged as we are as we ColdFusion to a whole new level in the coming versions.
- 70% of Fortune 500 using CF for app dev
- New customers coming to CF
- Why are you proud to use CF?
- WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
- What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?
Mentioned in this episode
-
ColdFusion CommandBox vs Node.js (Dev Feature shootout), with Nolan Erck
-
From Local Dev to Production with CommandBox, CFConfig, and Docker
-
ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin
-
The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps) with Bret Fisher
-
Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell
-
Secrets From the Folks Who Make the Official Lucee CFML Docker Images, with Geoff Bowers
-
Getting started fast with Docker, with Mark Drew
-
Revealing the ColdFusion 2018 Roadmap details, with Rakshith Naresh
-
Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification (new at CF Summit), with Elishia Dvorak
Listen to the Audio
Bio
Ashish Garg
Dir of Eng for ColdFusion and e-Learning, 15 years at Adobe. Responsible for many successful projects. JRUN 4 years.
Links
- Asgarg (at) adobe.com
Interview transcript
Michaela Light: 00:00:01 Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Ashish Garg, he's the VP of, uh, one of the director of engineering. Sorry, gave you a promotion then accidentally. Um, and when we talk, yeah, you're welcome. And you will to this podcast because we're on this, it's an exclusive look at ColdFusion 2020 roadmap and we're going to be looking at all the exciting features that are coming up in, uh, 2020 first time that you're going to hear about this. We'll look at some of the cool multi-cloud stuff, microservices, major improvements in deployment and containerization, uh, monitoring, logging, all kinds of cool things. So welcome Ashish.
Ashish Garg: 00:00:44 Thank you so much. Michella like to be here.
Michaela Light: 00:00:48 You're welcome. And if you haven't heard of him, he's actually been with Adobe for 15 years. Beavering away writing, you know, in charge of teams for several successful products there. And now he's with a cold fusion and I think he did a lot of Jay run in the past too, didn't you when you won that product.
Ashish Garg: 00:01:06 So yeah, that's, that's true. So j run is still one of my favorite products I ever worked on in my career. So I worked on Dayton for four years and I'm proud to say that I still remember the code. I, I can still look at the code and debug it. So it was like clearly the best time of my technical career. Like when I was coding, when I was doing the coding day in night out type of stuff.
Michaela Light: 00:01:31 Oh yeah. You're not allowed to code anymore.
Ashish Garg: 00:01:34 I wish I am. Yeah, you can say that. I'm not allowed to code anymore, but I wish I could call it more. It's not so much and yeah, the developers don't want me to code because obviously the same day then they have to wait on me and lets us, they use talk there on the, on the coding.
Michaela Light: 00:01:55 So you're in charge of the whole ColdFusion engineering team?
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Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.
Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.
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