ApacheCon NA 2015

The Diego project was originally conceived as a rewrite of the Droplet Execution Agent (DEA) component of the Cloud Foundry elastic runtime, the component responsible for scheduling, starting, stopping, and scaling  applications in Linux containers. Since Diego’s inception, this development effort has been guided by core principles such as simplicity, loose coupling, high cohesion, separation of concerns, and seeking the right abstractions.

These guiding principles have resulted in an extremely modular platform that provides a welcome home for your microservices. Microservices are loosely coupled, independently deployable applications whose individual scopes are guided by the concept of bounded contexts. Martin Fowler has described well the operational maturity required to employ microservices architectures, memorably stating “you must be this tall to ride the microservices ride,” with the capability to do rapid deployment and basic monitoring. Diego’s opinionated automation and health checking provide a great platform for operating microservices. At the same time, this platform has clean abstractions that support useful extension points.

In this presentation we'll explore the Diego architecture, highlight Diego’s role as the new core of the Cloud Foundry elastic runtime, and illustrated how Diego is being used as a component in other platforms such as Lattice and Spring XD. We'll also look at how Diego's abstractions provided an easy road to adding alternative backends for other platforms like core Windows/.NET support to Cloud Foundry. Finally, we'll discover how Diego's abstractions are providing the Spring Cloud project with a clear road to providing tighter integration between the Netflix OSS stack of services and Cloud Foundry, with a goal of enabling support for polyglot cloud-native application architectures.