BOSH Splitter
Channel: Cloud Foundry
Date: 2017-06-23

BOSH Splitter - Chris Weibel, Stark & Wayne & Balajee Nagarajan, GE Digital    

As Cloud Foundry operators, we want to provide a seamless experience to our end-users, while keeping Cloud Foundry itself up to date and scaled appropriately. While BOSH is a powerful tool for managing such complexity, those deployments can become unwieldy. Large deployments that involve hundreds, or even thousands of instances run into problems of scale, especially during upgrades.

Drawing on their experience keeping GE's Cloud Foundry - based Predix platform running and up to date, BOSH Splitter was created - a tool that helps split large-scale deployments into easier to manage bites. This tool allows you to split out a BOSH job in an existing deployment into its own manifest, without having to manage multiple deployment repos for the same environment. For example: In a large production environment, you might have 500 or more servers, most of these being runners or cells split across a few availability zones. These can be easily split out into their own deployment manifests and maintained while continuing to leverage your existing templates. You can then schedule your upgrade windows one availability zone at a time if desired, or implement whatever paradigm befits your organization.

Learn how Balajee, Chris and the rest of the team have successfully used BOSH Splitter to make Diego Cell stemcell upgrades much more bearable, and how you can use it in your own large-scale deployments today.

The tool and additional information can be found here: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/bosh-splitter

Balajee Nagarajan
Balajee Nagarajan is a Sr Engineering Manager at Predix Cloud Engineering team at GE Digital, responsible for building, maintaining and providing TLC for the application and container runtime environments for Predix, a job that gives him the joys of maintaining very large BOSH deployments. Before joining GE Digital, Balajee was part of the Avi Networks team building next gen Cloud Load balancers and responsible for bootstrapping their QA/Operations and Support teams. He has spent time attending/speaking at various meetups in SF and East bay.

Chris Weibel
Stark & Wayne, LLC
Cloud Engineer
Niagara Falls, NY

Chris Weibel is a Engineer Team Lead at Stark & Wayne and has worked on several projects including SHIELD & RDPG. The last two years have been spent helping deploy and maintain Cloud Foundry for GE Predix. A former DBA, SAN administrator and developer in the regulated banking, utilities and health care industries he has focused on discovering what DevOps needs to make their lives easier from several perspectives. He is a regular meetup speaker at Buffalo Lab's Database Seminars.