The Lightbend team recently sponsored the Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston. We had a booth there, and enjoyed conversations with hundreds of conference attendees that stopped by. We really appreciate the many folks that spent some time with us.
The most common question asked by those that stopped by the booth was “what is Lightbend, what do you do?” This actually was a perfect question to ask given the focus of the conference and for those that attended. More often than not, those that did ask this question were from the operations or DevOps community. Also, we heard that many are using OpenShift or were seriously considering it and wanted to know how to use this amazing new platform best. This is why “who is Lightbend” was the perfect question. OpenShift is the perfect solution for what we do with Lightbend Platform, which provides our customers with the tools, technologies, training, support, and expertise needed to create applications for cloud-native infrastructure technologies. OpenShift is the preferred solution for using Lightbend Pipelines–the newest module of Lightbend Platform–which accelerates your journey towards real-time streaming applications.
[WATCH A 2-MIN INTRO TO LIGHTBEND PIPELINES]
No matter where you are in your journey into the cloud there is always something to learn. A good starting place for those of you that are moving to OpenShift is the Reactive Manifesto. Recently the term “Reactive” has become popular. Often, however, when you hear the term Reactive, it is about Reactive Programming, which is programming with asynchronous data streams. However, the term Reactive also refers to Reactive Systems, which is about building systems that are always Responsive because they are built to be Resilient, Elastic and Message Driven.
The core concepts of the definition of Reactive Systems apply to any system. In the case of moving applications to OpenShift, however, one question to ask is each system that is moving to OpenShift a Reactive System. That is, will the system continue to be responsive when things break and when processing loads increase. The reason for the heightened awareness of Reactive Systems is that the OpenShift platform provides the foundational ingredients for building systems that do not fail and systems that do not slow down.
Having the right tools and expertise to build Reactive Systems for OpenShift environments is where we at Lightbend come in. Another resource we provide to learn more about how to build Reactive Systems is a free self-paced series of six Reactive Architecture training classes. In these classes, you will learn about the principles of Reactive Architecture.
One final note that is at a more detailed technical level about pod CPU allocations, this is especially relevant to those of you that are responsible or will soon be responsible for managing your OpenShift environments. Pods are configured with specifications for requests and limits for CPU and memory. A lesson learned is that setting a CPU limit hurts more than it helps. For more details see CPU considerations for Java applications running in Docker and Kubernetes, written by one of our Akka engineers, Christopher Batey.
OpenShift is a fantastic platform, and it is the perfect platform for building cloud-native systems with Lightbend tools and technologies. For those of you that are asking the question - how do we effectively use OpenShift - we can help. Check out more about the Lightbend-Red Hat Alliance for more details. Better yet, contact us and let's talk.
