Real PaaS: CloudFoundry

During the last few years in Software Development, I have found myself doing very repetitive tasks regarding deployment of applications. Among them, these are:

• Provisioning of Hardware (or VM)
• Install Application Runtime (Java, Rails, Node, etc)
• Deploying of Binaries (War file, Processes, etc)
• Load Balancer Configuration
• Security Configuration (SSL, Documents, etc)
• Ensure Service Connectivity to external systems (databases, enterprise logs, auditing, etc)
• Update Firewall policies and documentation.

I have scripted most of these in many ways (particularly using Bash,  Puppet, Monit, etc). Most of these are not only done by me, but also prevent me from doing actual real work (developing solutions). If you find yourself in this situation, I'd like to introduce you to CloudFoundry, a PaaS project I have been following for some time. I'll plan on adding more entries on these concepts soon so that I can try to document my learning about this great platform.

Handling JSON in bash using underscore

Now on days, software components expose some sort of API using a REST interface. In addition, the typical response comes in JSON format. While this very convenient for a browser to interpret, using JSON in a bash script is not as simple. I came across this project on github called underscore and I must admit I liked it. I highly recommend reading it's short README file. I figured I'd write some about my issues installing it.

Surefire/Failsafe maven plugin and SSL

I was puzzled today by an interesting feature introduced by the "surefire" and "failsafe" maven plugins (used for unit/integration test my components). These were introduced with their 2.1 release.  As I had components calling web services using 2-way SSL for authentication, I noticed that my test cases where failing when using maven via command line (mvn clean install). They worked on the IDE (Eclipse/STS) fine, but were not working on the command line. I saw the following error:

PKIX path building failed: ... unable to find valid certification path to requested target

 So it was clear that maven was not passing the SSL system properties from my .mavenrc file:


This is what I discovered as I read more the documentation.