Posts

0. Abstract BOSH is a VM orchestrator; a BOSH Director creates, configures, monitors, and deletes VMs. The BOSH Director interoperates with a number of IaaSes (Infrastructure as a Service), one of which is VMware vSphere, a virtualization platform. BOSH traditionally operates exclusively within the IPv4 networking space (i.e. the BOSH Director has an IPv4 address (e.g. 10.0.0.6), and the VMs which it deploys also have IPv4 addresses); however, recent changes have enabled IPv6 networking within the BOSH Framework. ...

“BOSH deploys Concourse, and Concourse deploys BOSH” —Cloud Foundry koan A BOSH Director is a VM (virtual machine) orchestrator which is itself a VM. BOSH solves the problem of keeping its VMs’ applications (operating systems (stemcells) and releases) up-to-date with the command, bosh deploy; however, this begs the question, “what keeps the BOSH Director itself up-to-date?”. [Quis custodiet?] We explore using Concourse, a Continuous Integration (CI) server, and bosh-deployment [Updating BOSH], in order to create a Concourse pipeline which updates, in turn, a BOSH director on AWS (Amazon Web Services), on Microsoft Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Updating all three BOSH directors can be accomplished with a single click. [One click] Best of all, our directors are re-deployed with a recent stemcell, BOSH release, and CPI release. [How recent?] ...

0. Abstract A BOSH director is a virtual machine (VM) orchestrator which deploys VMs to various Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The BOSH Command Line (CLI) communicates with the director over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). While most BOSH directors are deployed with self-signed certificates, it is possible to configure a BOSH director with certificates issued by a recognized certificate authority (CA) (e.g. Comodo, Symantec, Let’s Encrypt). This blog post describes a technique to deploy a BOSH director with a CA-issued SSL certificate. ...

VMware’s vSphere is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which runs Virtual Machines (VMs). BOSH is a VM orchestrator which automates the creation of VMs. NSX-T is a pluggable Network backend for vSphere (and other hypervisors). NSX-T allows the creation of opaque networks in vSphere, networks whose detail and configuration of the network is unknown to vSphere and which is managed outside vSphere. With the release of BOSH vSphere CPI v40, users can attach their BOSH-deployed VMs to an NSX-T opaque network. ...

When Hacker News picked up Part 1 of our series of blog posts on running public NTP servers, a contributor said, “I wish he’d explained … what they ultimately did (since there’s no part 3 that I can find).” We had dropped the ball — we had never concluded the series, had never written part 3, had never described the strategies to mitigate the data transfer costs. This blog post remedies that oversight; it consists of two parts: the first part addresses strategies to reduce the cost of running an NTP server, and the second part discusses side topics (aspects of running an NTP server). ...