Boston JUG - Evening of AppDev in the Cloud Workshop

Boston JUG

A few weeks back I spent an evening with the Boston Java User Group (JUG), a group I've visited through the years as part of my journey through the world of Red Hat product evangelism.

This is a smart group of developers that enjoy everything from core Java, business processes, business logic, Cloud and more.

It's always a group that I like to test my workshops on as they provide a good baseline of knowledge and user interaction, ensuring what I'm trying to bring to the application developer is actually resonating.

This evening was during the week of OpenStack Summit in Boston and gave me a chance to step out to the Rapid 7 offices downtown for pizza and good conversations around the topics of application development in the Cloud. There were 44 registered attendees and the hosts at Rapid 7 provided a fantastic area for the attendees to work in.

Let's take a look at what the workshop offers attendees and what that experience looks like.

Attendees working hard.

In this workshop you're a developer working for Destinaisa, a travel agency that needs to setup its online bookings applications back end services. Attendees are installing the OpenShift Container Platform on their laptop, then installing JBoss BRMS to work in the Destinasia discount rules.

Once the rules are completed, attendees leverage Ansible playbooks to experience infrastructure automation in action.

Each playbook deploys a new container based service supporting flight, hotel, car and discount rule queries from any application.

In total attendees are running 6 container based applications or services on their laptops in a private PaaS before testing this solution with a REST client by sending a booking and verifying the discounts provided by the rule services.

If for any reason attendees couldn't complete the workshop in the time allotted, it's available online for further exploration at home.

This being the inaugural run of application development in the Cloud workshop, the focus was on observing the progression of attendees through the material and ensuring that it was clear to all.

While the comments from attendees were enthusiastic, there were some issues that needed to be addressed over the last few weeks to make the work flow through the workshop make more sense.

These changes are in place and include some major improvements for both Linux and Windows users of the workshop.

I will be posting a more extensive article on the workshop contents itself later this week, so stay tuned for that announcement.