Cloud Native Java

Chapter 5. The Forklifted Application

So you’ve got that shiny new distributed runtime, infinite greenfield potential, and lots of existing applications; now what?

The Contract

Cloud Foundry aims to improve velocity by reducing or at least making consistent the operational concerns associated with deploying and managing applications. Cloud Foundry is an ideal place to run online web-based services and applications, service integrations, and back-office type processing.

Cloud Foundry optimizes for the continuous delivery of web applications and services by making assumptions about the shape of the applications it runs. The inputs into Cloud Foundry are applications: Java (.jar or, if you insist, .war) binaries, Ruby on Rails applications, Node.js applications, etc. Cloud Foundry provides well-known operational benefits (log aggregation, routing, self-healing, dynamic scale-up and scale-down, security, etc.) to the applications it runs. There is an implied contract between the platform and the applications, and this contract allows the platform to keep promises to the applications it runs.

Some applications may never be able to meet that contract. Other applications might be able to, albeit with some soft-touch adjustments. In this chapter, we’ll look at possible soft-touch refactorings to coerce legacy applications to run on Cloud Foundry.

The goal isn’t, in this case, to build applications that are native to the cloud; it is to move existing workloads to the cloud to reduce an ...