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Hello everyone.
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Okay, I have a lot of slides to get through, so I'm just going to start. If you have questions, please hold them until the end.
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There are two slides that prompt for questions. Did you hear that? It's just a prompt for questions.
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That's cool. Okay, um, so I'm here to talk about Beehive.
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The first part of the talk is going to go by kind of fast, and you'll probably wonder what you are actually listening to. That's okay because in the second part of the talk, I'll hopefully reveal that; we just have to get through the first stuff.
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So just to get started, Beehive: Scalable Application Deployment by Ari Lerner.
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Yes, that would be me. Oh boy.
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Okay, so I'm a lead software engineer at AT&T Interactive in Glendale, California.
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I am soon to be an innovation coach at AT&T. On Wednesday, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
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I'll be starting a new job.
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I've been working with Ruby since 2004. Oh man, I feel like I'm getting older.
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I've been working with Rails since 2005. However, I haven't used Rails in about a year.
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Right now, I primarily work in distributed computing and systems deployment at AT&T Interactive.
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I also have a totally rad Mini Cooper; unfortunately, it's not the one in the picture because that's a really cool Mini Cooper.
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I also have an awesome dog. Don't tell anyone I have that because she's just a little girl.
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So, I've been working in open source for a long time, primarily in open source.
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You can see all my open-source projects at GitHub under my name, Ari Lerner.
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These are just examples of some of my open source work.
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But let's focus less on me and more on what I'm here to talk about today, which is Beehive.
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The subtitle is scalable application deployment, as the program suggests.
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So, what is it? Oh man, raise your hand if you can't deal with the resolution problems.
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What is it? Beehive is an open-source solution to complex application deployment stacks.
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It's fault-tolerant, application-agnostic, natively scalable, and event-driven, which are important features. It's also multi-tenant and has intelligent routing.
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It is a deployment system—let me clear that up—it's not a Ruby framework or a Ruby library. Since I'm at a Ruby conference, I should make that distinction.
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It's MIT licensed and free. As I mentioned before, it's open source, tested, and currently in use internally in production at AT&T Interactive.
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It's extensible, and I’ll show you how in a little while. It's distributed, written primarily in Ruby, Bash, C, and Erlang, with three AT&T Interactive developers collaborating on it, as well as open-source contributors from the web, notably one person in Argentina.
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So, that was a whole bunch of buzzwords, am I right?
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So, what actually is it? Beehive is a tool that enables developers to deploy and manage their own applications in a scalable, multi-tenant environment without having to deal with deployment directly.
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Okay, so basically, it's just an intelligent routing mesh. That's a lot easier to understand.
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So why do we do this? Why even change anything? Because deployment today is really rough. It requires a lot of resources—human resources, computer resources.
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Most of the time, you end up deploying one application to one computer, so 99.9% of the time, that computer is doing nothing.
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Unless it’s an AMHadoop mesh, in which case, 88% of the time, it's not doing anything. The other problem with deployment today is that you have to deal with scheduled releases.
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It’s like you're not going to deploy until Thursday at 2 AM, and then you have to stay up until Thursday at 2 AM.
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So really, I'm a developer; I'm not a deployment person. Well, that's not entirely true anymore for me, but most of the time, what I want to deal with is only development. I don't want to deal with deployment.
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Deployment today does not focus on the application nor does it focus on the developer or anyone else involved.
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I suggest we have an application revolution! Let's focus on the application. Let the server managers manage the servers and let the developers develop.
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What we want is to make it easy to deploy rapidly, so when you add a change and all your continuous integration server tests pass, you can deploy immediately.
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There should be no need to wait.
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Beehive enables rapid deployment. It’s built to scale; your application can grow as needed.
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For example, if your application is like Twitter and all of a sudden people in Iran are using it to express political dissent, then you have to be prepared to scale.
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Beehive also handles failures gracefully. It's designed to help streamline the deployment process, so developers don’t have to learn new tools and can easily integrate it into their workflow.
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We at AT&T Interactive like to use 'git push.' You can also utilize pure HTTP with Beehive.
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Most of the examples I'll cover today will focus on pure HTTP, which is our case, but there is a Ruby gem being developed. If you want to contribute and don’t know Erlang or C or Bash, you can also create your own HTTP client in Python, for example.
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So, how do we work with Beehive? First, you need to define an app.
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You can do that using a curl request or soon the Beehive gem to create an application. Essentially, it takes your application and prepares it for the Beehive environment.
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How do you deploy an application? You can use either a git post-commit hook, which is what we do at AT&T Interactive, or you just make a curl request.
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Beehive checks out and bundles the application and performs error checking at every stage. If it can’t clone it because, say, your public key isn't there, it will let you know.
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If it can't find a dependency during the bundling process, it will also notify you. It’s very communicative.
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Once everything succeeds, Beehive is designed to hold incoming requests until the application is ready. It starts routing requests to the newly deployed applications.
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If your application goes down for any reason, the old version will continue to serve until the new version is fully prepared, ensuring 99.9% uptime.
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This dramatically reduces the time needed for deployment from scheduled releases to mere seconds.
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The router will temporarily hold any HTTP requests until the application can accept them. This way, all incoming requests are managed without creating a bottleneck.
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Beehive facilitates intelligent routing to manage heavy traffic efficiently. For example, if there are sudden spikes in user activity, Beehive can scale itself seamlessly without developer intervention.
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It's equipped to handle these challenges efficiently thanks to its intelligent router. If a server goes down, the connected clients remain unaware of any disruption.
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The failover process is handled automatically and distributed among active services.
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But wait, what happens if an HTTP request comes in while you're deploying an app that isn't up? The intelligent router in Beehive holds requests until it can successfully establish a connection with the application.
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Once the application spools up, requests flow smoothly and as intended.
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This process can significantly improve deployment times, making it less of a chore and more accessible for developers who want to focus on creating outstanding applications.
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In the case that a malfunction occurs during a deployment, Beehive’s design maintains maximum uptime. Requests will continue to be processed through the old application until the transition is confirmed successful.
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In summary, Beehive aims to transform the deployment experience.
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For a more developer-friendly approach to app delivery, Beehive represents a significant advancement in modern application deployment.
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The architecture prioritizes application performance while providing robust failover capability.
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Beehive is designed to help developers focus on writing code instead of worrying about the deployment process.
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It automates various deployment tasks allowing quick responses to user needs.
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Whether deploying a new feature or updating an existing one, Beehive's routing allows for speedy transitions.
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Developer tools like Beehive can enhance collaboration while simplifying the entire deployment experience. There are many exciting opportunities for enhancing Beehive in the future.
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As the community continues to grow, the potential for Beehive to integrate new features will also diversify, making it a valuable asset to developers everywhere.
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With that, I’ll keep you posted as we navigate the evolving landscape of deployment. Thank you for your time, and now I'm open to any questions.
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Feel free to ask anything about Beehive or my experiences with application deployment.
