Fugue now supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region, which means federal agencies, like enterprises, can automate operations in the cloud fast, while simultaneously meeting regulatory demands. Fugue deployments start with powerful, but easy-to-understand code declarations in a composition that governs a system’s infrastructure. By including select libraries in that composition with simple import statements, a particular agency’s compliance regime gets integrated from the start. This kind of fully realized policy-as-code provides a scalable protocol for agency cloud ops and increases speed to mission. The Power Behind Policy-as-Code The power behind policy-as-code lies in validations. Fugue ships with some common validations, but also enables agencies and businesses to...
Fugue uses Python extensively throughout our cloud security SaaS product and in our support tools, due to its ease-of-use, python security, extensive package library, and powerful language tools. One thing we've learned from building complex software for the cloud is that a language is only as good as its debugging and profiling tools. Logic errors, CPU spikes, and memory leaks are inevitable, but a good debugger, CPU profiler, and memory profiler can make finding these errors significantly easier and faster, letting our developers get back to creating Fugue’s dynamic cloud orchestration and enforcement system. Let’s look at a case in point. In the fall, our metrics reported that a Python component of Fugue called the reflector was experiencing random restarts and instability after a...
“It worked on my laptop!” Seven weeks into your latest project, you’ve gotten to the point where management wants a demo. Your first spike was run from a node server that you ran on your laptop. When another developer joined, you moved the environment to Vagrant so you could share an image. When the third and fourth bodies were assigned, you decided to save time by automating the installation with Chef. You’ve all been collaborating effectively for weeks and now you need to put it out on a cloud provider to give your stakeholders access. Your cloud infrastructure was set up by a different team with domain expertise on the platform. Sadly, that did not confer upon them a psychic ability to anticipate the networking needs of your Riak cluster. Nor did it allow them to anticipate...
Harry Weller, General Partner leading NEA’s east coast venture practice, passed away unexpectedly on November 19, 2016. Please see NEA’s words for Harry. J. R. R. Tolkien, one of Harry’s favorites, said, “A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.” Harry never counted on life or decisions or business being safe. He looked into this world and bypassed the routine—working fiercely, shaping vivid insights, sharing a smart magic, driving others forward emphatically and lifting them up generously at the same time. He knew that noise was just noise and broke past it. He had the rare wisdom that an explorer finds and shares. A phenomenon in business, Harry was a committed partner to companies and technologies. He had an uncanny instinct about both. His profound impact on Fugue will ever...
The approach taken by Fugue is to allow cloud infrastructure to be treated as code. This concept is required if developers are to generate applications that can exploit the cloud's capabilities and deliver on the promise of immutable infrastructure. -Ovum's On The Radar report on Fugue Fugue provides simplification of your life on the cloud through abstractions. Abstractions can be expressed in one of two ways: as black boxes, or as language. Fugue puts as much into language as we can, so that you can do things with it that we didn't predict. Black boxes are easier for a platform builder to make, because they do things in one particular way. They are also less flexible for the user, because they do things in one particular way, which may not be the way the user needs or prefers.
As we migrate applications to the cloud or build there natively, cloud computing itself is changing how we compose and operate our systems. We increasingly compose systems of elastic collections of services running on many compute instances. We now commonly employ application statelessness in order to exploit cloud system elasticity and to achieve the performance required of web scale systems. As we make these changes, we discover that systems management, operations, policy enforcement, and security in the cloud cannot be accomplished easily with tools and methods adapted from traditional data center environments. Our reality is that the elastic compute systems of any given enterprise are now distributed across tens, hundreds, thousands or more nodes running an ever-growing array of...
We at Luminal are launching our new vision for computing: Fugue. Fugue embodies a set of core computing patterns that rely upon: Automating the creation and operations of cloud infrastructure through a no-touch runtime environment. This uses an active infrastructure OS under users’ control and within their environment. Short-lived compute instances that are created and destroyed by this infrastructure OS, resulting in higher fidelity systems that optimize performance and cost. Simplification of compute instances to reduce vulnerability. You may recognize in these patterns the meme of “immutable infrastructure”—the idea that computing infrastructure elements not be changed through in situ repair or upgrade—but rather that they be purposefully thrown away and replaced in order...
In two previous posts, I explored the concepts of "Minimum Viable Clouds" and "More than Minimum Clouds." To recap, a Minimum Viable Cloud must: be an SOA hide implementation be fully automated be a utility have global fault tolerance be Opex A cloud that is More than the Minimum must: promote stateless, distributed compute have asynchronous messaging have data persistence as a service Future clouds are those that move past the performance and composition aspects of cloud-native applications into new territory in efficiency and security. There are many possible futures for cloud, and likely several that will be realized. At Luminal, we have a vision of cloud computing that provides significantly more control, efficiency, and security than is currently...
The M in MVC (Minimum Viable Cloud) implies that there are additional capabilities in a mature cloud implementation beyond those outlined in our previous post, which introduced MVC. Recall those sine qua non MVC requirements: Clouds are APIs Clouds are SOAs Clouds Hide Implementation Clouds are Fully Automated Clouds are Utilities Clouds have Global Fault Tolerance Clouds are Opex Additional capabilities that constitute fully developed cloud ("C") exist in areas like service offerings - having more of them, such as object storage or noSQL databases. But, metaprogramming capabilities that allow you to compose and orchestrate systems across resources are the centerpiece of C. Let's get specific. C>M Clouds promote stateless, distributed compute Cloud-native...
Every time a new, hot technology appears on the scene, many companies with old, boring technologies slap a sticker on the front of their product, proclaiming it to be a torchbearer for the new tech. It's something of a parlor trick. Certainly this has been the case with cloud technologies. As a result, there's a need to differentiate things that actually deliver the promised benefits of cloud from things that are just cloudwashed. After a decade of building service-oriented architectures and cloud products for AWS and others, I've had time to reflect on how to distinguish the real from the marketed. Others have taken a crack at this, but explanations that begin with the developer's perspective - the developer who builds and uses new systems on cloud infrastructure - are not especially...
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