How to massively deploy a web application to 100+ server? - deployment

Let's say I have a web application in nodejs or php and I want to deploy to 100+ server, also to push application updates without destroying the data ..
I have been reading about a lot of things like configuration management systems like chef, containerization && micro-services via docker..
But I didn't grasp how to use these tools to do what I want or even if there are better tools than it.
So I ask for a guidance, anything will be appreciated.
Note : one server will have a clone of the application with a few customization for each client.

Related

The best way to deploy/redeploy PHP code from github to GCP Compute Engine LAMP Stack [Google Click to Deploy]

overflowers!
Can someone please advice me on the best way to continuously deploy PHP code from github to GCP Compute Engine? Specifically to GCP Marketplace LAMP Stack, which is the Google Click to Deploy VM? Here is the link to the market place
Your advice is greatly appreciated!
Click to Deploy (C2D) is an excellent way to test drive solutions but I'm (admittedly somewhat naive but) skeptical that it's a good approach to combine C2D with customization.
That said, the C2D solutions are published and you could, with some work, customize the solution as the basis for your own solution.
In other words, I'd recommend not combining the C2D as-is but to customize the tools that it uses (!) for your needs.
The README explains how the LAMP VM is built (Cloud Build, packer, chef).
Without wishing to in any way impugn your approach, please consider alternative ways to deploy PHP to Google Cloud Platform. Running Apache and MySQL on a VM may be entirely appropriate for your needs but you will need to maintain the OS, Apache, MySQL etc.
If you're goal is to deploy a PHP (web) app that needs a MySQL-compliant database and you want to be more "cloud native", you could consider using:
App Engine or Cloud Run to host your PHP app (see link)
Cloud SQL for the database (see link)
The above would require more initial work but, if you want more flexibility, resilience and less "chore", I think you'd benefit from the investment.
In addition opening up the app like this would facilitate leveraging Cloud Monitoring, Logging, Debugger etc

Is it possible to install server software while I just have a hosting

I'm new to web back-end and about to deploy a website(with both backend and frontend). As far as I know, If you own a server, you can install whatever software you want. But how about when you have a free hosting, is it possible for you to install softwares like Tomcat, Mysql,etc yourself.
Ps: as far as I know, hosting is a folder inside a server, so in my opinion, you'll depend on the server which contains the hosting. Still I get confused.
I highly appreciate you all for spending time read this post.
Hosting is just deploying your applications and then serve them to the internet. If you are using free hosting, I suppose that they must be managed service which mean you cannot do anything except the functions the hosting provider provide. In my opinion, it is better to get your own vps if you want to control your server fully. You can just install software you want in ubuntu or other supported os, and then serve your port to public. If you would like to try, you can use some cheap vps provider first like Contabo VPS.

Deploying Vue.js application consuming REST API

I'm trying to deploy my first Vue.js application on Heroku, but I need some clarification.
My app is a very simple client consuming REST service API.
I deployed the REST service on a Heroku dyno and now I need to also deploy my front-end application.
Is it possible to install client app on the same dyno? Is it a good practice, or should I deploy the client as a separate application?
What is the "real-world" production approach?
NOTE REST APIs are based on Java/Spring MVC.
It is certainly possible, and can keep your dyno costs down.
I answered a similar question here. That specific answer may or may not be suitable to your needs depending on what server technology you are using etc., however, the general idea is that you can certainly maintain multiple parts of your app within a single git repo that gets deployed to a single Heroku app.
Such a single Heroku app may or may not consist of multiple Process Types which may each run on one or more dynos.

Developing with Azure Mobile Services?

What is currently the "best" way to develop a back-end system in Azure Mobile Services?
Specifically, what tools are available? From what I've seen, most examples just go to the Management portal and manually add a few lines into the script window. This is worse than using just Notepad, and doesn't have any concept of version control...
Is there any way to make a project in VS 2012 that contains all the Node.js code that will run in the Azure Mobile service? Is there a way of fully running that code on a local development environment that mimics the Mobile Services?
I need to have server-side code with much more complexity than is shown in most of the Mobile Services samples or documentation that I've been able to find.
I have a web site, and a Win 8 Store App that need to authenticate against, and access relatively complex data structures from a back-end database. The solution being pushed right now all seem to include Mobile Services at the center of it, using simple REST against raw tables, but all the examples are too simple to be useful.
Can someone point me to a "real-life" sample of using Mobile Services, and a "mature" way of developing and testing such a system using the tools in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
Why you have no other option than the Management portal is really beyond me. It seems very awkward for a C#/.NET developer to go back to Notepad style programming with console.log() debugging.
What I would love to see is some Node.js entry points that you could connect to a regular C# assembly which could fulfill the request (as in ASP.NET MVC or Web API) having the full .NET Framework at your disposal.
What I could see as a possible architecture is to have:
ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure
--- writes processed data with logic to --->
Azure SQL DB <--- reads from --- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
Or
Cloud Worker Role on Azure ---- crunching/processing ----> Azure SQL DB <---- reading/writing raw data ---- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
You can use the Mobile Services facility for mobile devices facilities, scheduling and push notifications with limited code and do most of the coding in a managed .NET environment.
The AMS (Azure Mobile Services) along with Azure has advanced dramatically since this post was written and the replied answers.
Some of this stuff still holds true. If you have a ton of node.js written not in the Azure cloud portal, you will want to copy and paste to the portal online, custom api calls section and even perhaps sql backend tables for CRUD operations.
The hope for C# developers is that it is NOW in preview mode in which YOU CAN skip node.js and build everything without node.js very shortly... Some bugs to work out, but in 6 months this will be fairly solid.
I had questions and issue and a guy named Carlos carlosfigueira was very helpful.
Azure Mobile Services - Getting more user information
Josh covers unit testing server-scripts here: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Unit_testing_Mobile_Services_scripts_Day_7_.aspx
In this tutorial, he uses the Mocha testing framework for JS (id TDD mode) and walks through an example for testing an INSERT script that encrypts the value of a particular property (text) and a read script that decrypts it (value is encrypted at rest in SQL db).
You can also find aggregation of links and tutorials here.
I would suggest that you build this solution using Windows Azure Mobile solutions especially it supports the Node JS NPM right now, which means you can create the API you want on the Windows Azure using the Node JS NPM and can work with it using WAMS easily. have a look on the following link it will help you understand what I want to say more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx
For the Client I also suggest that you build it using SignalR which is designed for cases such yours where real time applications require a lot of transactions from the server side.
http://www.asp.net/signalr
you can also find more details about how you can integrate both of them in the following link: http://hhaggan.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/signalr-node-js/
I hope these help you, let me know if you need anything else.
For running locally, the mobile service has the same Kudu environment available in azure websites, so you can browse to https://your_service_name.scm.azure-mobile.net If you navigate to the Debug Console from the top nav, you can download everything running in the site/wwwroot folder.
You can run this nodejs project locally (On windows only if you require the SQL Server npm package). Your code is in App_Data/config/scripts. If you replace the downloaded content with your current local git working copy, you can develop and debug locally, and then push changes as usual.
Tools I use:
Eclipse with JS environment (or any nodejs IDE).
Git
Postman
Steps:
Enable source control to your azure mobile service.
Pull to your local and create a eclipse project with the source.
Make changes and push.
Test with POSTman
This procedure allows me to develop really fast and eclipse tell me the common JS errors. But it has obvious downside:
No debugging (I use console.log)
The project ended up with a lot of commits (its hard to use git for proper source control)
I just did a blog post on running Azure Mobile Services locally: http://www.mikelanzetta.com/2014/09/running-azure-mobile-services-locally/ - basically it interrogates the API and starts up express, and allows you to run mocha yourself locally. It's a bit cleaner than pulling down the full wwwroot from the scm link, and I found using my local runner as a git submodule made it easy to work with (and easy for me to use VSO for managing my tests).
Anyway, for actual development, I use the Git integration and WebStorm - it automatically figures out the tasks in my local Gruntfile and makes it easy to run and test. For once it's deployed, Postman is helpful.

Heroku-like services for Scala?

I love Heroku but I would prefer to develop in Scala rather than Ruby on Rails.
Does anyone know of any services like Heroku that work with Scala?
UPDATE: Heroku now officially supports Scala - see answers below for links
As of October 3rd 2011, Heroku officially supports Scala, Akka and sbt.
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/10/3/scala/
Update
Heroku has just announced support for Java.
Update 2
Heroku has just announced support for Scala
Also
Check out Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
To deploy Java applications using
Elastic Beanstalk, you simply:
Create your application as you
normally would using any editor or IDE
(e.g. Eclipse).
Package your
deployable code into a standard Java
Web Application Archive (WAR file).
Upload your WAR file to Elastic
Beanstalk using the AWS Management
Console, the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse,
the web service APIs, or the Command
Line Tools.
Deploy your application.
Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk
handles the provisioning of a load
balancer and the deployment of your
WAR file to one or more EC2 instances
running the Apache Tomcat application
server.
Within a few minutes you will
be able to access your application at
a customized URL (e.g.
http://myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com/).
Once an application is running,
Elastic Beanstalk provides several
management features such as:
Easily deploy new application versions
to running environments (or rollback
to a previous version).
Access
built-in CloudWatch monitoring metrics
such as average CPU utilization,
request count, and average latency.
Receive e-mail notifications through
Amazon Simple Notification Service
when application health changes or
application servers are added or
removed.
Access Tomcat server log
files without needing to login to the
application servers.
Quickly restart
the application servers on all EC2
instances with a single command.
Another strong contender is Cloud Foundry. One of the nice features of Cloud Foundry is the ability to have a local version of "the cloud" running on your laptop so you can deploy and test offline.
I started working on the exact same thing as what you said a few weeks ago. I use Lift, which is a great framework and has a lot of potential, on top of Linux chroot environment.
I'm done with a demo version, but Linux chroot is not that stable (nor secure), so I'm now switching to FreeBSD jail on Amazon EC2, and hopefully it'll be done soon.
http://lifthub.net/
There are also other Java hosting environment including VMForce mentioned above.
If you are looking for a custom setup which also has the ease of deployment that heroku offers: http://dotcloud.com. They are invite only right now but I was given access in under three days. I am working on a Lift/MongoDB project there and it works well.
Off the top of my head, only VMForce comes to mind, but its not available yet. This will be a Java-oriented service, so that probably means you'll have to spend a wee bit of time figuring out how to package the app.
For more discussion, there was a debate about this in 2008.
I'm not entirely sure if it's really suitable or not, but people have deployed Scala applications to Google App Engine, for example http://mawson.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/first-steps-with-scala-on-google-app-engine/
Actually you can run scala on heroku right now. You don't believe it?
https://github.com/lstoll/heroku-playframework-scala
I'm not sure the tricks lstoll has used are legit but using the
new cedar platform where you can run custom processes and some
ingenious Gemfile hacking he has managed to bootstrap the Java
play platform into a process. Seems to work as he has a live
site running a test page.
Stax cloud service offers preconfigured lift project skeleton. Also, there is a tutorial on how to deploy lift project to appengine.