Ashish Garg talks about “Adobe ColdFusion 2020 Roadmap (Multi-cloud, micro-services and more), with Ashish Garg” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

ColdFusion Future

PM → VM → Cloud → Containers → Serverless

What will make CF take off more

CF 2020 Vision - To be the modernized platform of choice for building cloud-native microservice applications with an absolute focus on ease of use without getting locked to a particular cloud vendor (multi-cloud).

Multi-cloud

Micro-services container deploy

CF 2020 Roadmap - modernized ColdFusion for the next decade

Compare to the move from CF5 to CFMX J2EE

That enabled Enterprise java development using CF

Now cloud

Cloud

Most enterprises are moving to the cloud

Why is cloud so important to enterprises and CIOs?

Less upfront cost

CapEx vs OpEx

Pay monthly vs up front.

Computing as a utility vs investment in build and maintaining, specialization of server building and maintenance (including security patching, upgrades), better redundancy

And more flexibility for having to know how many servers you need up front - or change the number of servers day to day, minute to minute. 

Better for the budget - more predictable 

Faster time to market, less work on maintaining servers. Easier to manage

Managed services - including software

Many extra services available via the cloud

Eg database as a service

Sizing, no downtime or maintenance

No need for DBA (apart from database design)

40+ AWS services

Backup is taken care of for you

CF will provide easy access to key cloud services - See Services section below

The old distributed vs centralized debate

Easier to scale

Reliability 

Better but now centralized so when it does go down it affects everything

AWS went down

Multi-cloud, multi-region deployment

Multi-cloud - better features or implementation on certain cloud providers

Eg HIPPA compliance easier on Azure

Better regional availability, government restrictions on US and EU govt sites

Can start small for development then easily scale (both in how beefy the machine is and number of machines in the cluster)

CF makes multi-cloud easy

AWS

Azure

Combined AWS and Azure make up ⅔ of the cloud market for CFers currently

Other cloud vendors coming in future

Cloud platform-agnostic - portability

Portability layer so CFers can write this for new cloud providers   as DO

How fast can it move to a new cloud

Depends on how the app is written. Containers make this easier. Full-blown cloud app needs abstraction layer. Database provisioning may take time.

AWS cloud formation template to make a new one

CF cloud licensing 

Moving to cloud licensing (granularly pay per hour/minute)

Rakshith working on this

Technical issues are easier to solve

Free Intro pricing for developers compare to AWS - Freemium marketing - low barrier to entry

CF AWS already has hourly pricing - AMI

Monitoring

Monitoring, security and scaling built-in

Performance Monitoring Toolset (PMT) will be transformed to be cloud/container ready - Monitoring of cloud services

Messaging and alerts of performance issues

AWS cloud watch integration

Centralized performance monitoring of cluster (Virtual Private Cloud = VPC)

Auto-scaling? Kubanetics or ECS orchestration of containers

Move to serverless

Calls going out, coming back, performance metrics of cloud services

Logging

All logging to be sent to a centralized repo across all the nodes. The idea is to make log inspection for debugging across your nodes and microservices super simple.

Possible new dedicated logging service and integration with existing logging services such as Splunk

API Manager logging, control and monitoring of API use will move into cloud too

Container support

Why - move from monolith apps to REST-based API microservice apps and granular runtime modules

Lean and small code, more efficient use of computing resources

Fast loading

Granular roll back to an earlier version of service API

Better QA because can test each microservice separately

More agile, safe to take more risks

CI/CD pipeline

Fast deployment

API manager and microservices

a hidden CF advantage

Some future improvements to API manager have been made

For cloud compatible

Run on the cloud with common Redis caching in your VPC

Installation

Nimble runtimes

Download a tiny zip containing a core base and a package manager – instead of the present 1 GB installer. From 1 GB to less than 50 MB.

May not have an installer GUI

Easier container creation for average developers

Speed of loading/startup time 5 seconds or less

Similar to NPM = Node Package Manager 

Auto-scaling of code to see what tags are used

Great for microservice code that 

Could it auto pull in any extra code at runtime?

DevOps - Tool to scan ColdFusion app and infer CF modules that are required

App + dependencies to build/create CF Runtime and Docker image

Integrate with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins to host the build/Docker image and host it on the cloud

Container - Fully scriptable Docker container to programmatically configure all the settings needed

Full modularity to create a micro container including just the modules that the microservice/application needs

Language

“CFScript 2.0”

We will have an ECMA Script compliant CFScript version that fully resolves the script syntax issues that we saw previously.

Availability of developers - easier to hire programmers who understand JavaScript

Polyglot programming - creating apps in multiple languages

Frontend in Angular, React or Vue with backend in CF - similar language

Why React and Node became popular because language is similar

Backward compatibility with prior CFScript version 

Cloud Skills 

94% of IT managers find hiring clouds skills very hard

There is a huge upside for you ColdFusion developers out there too. According to the OpsRamp cloud skill survey, 94% of the IT decision-makers find it difficult to hire cloud-native and multi-cloud operators. So we are not just talking about a cloud skill gap, it is a cloud skill crisis. With the future version of ColdFusion, all you ColdFusion developers will be upskilled to become competent cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the ease of use that ColdFusion has to offer – with this CF developers will be amidst the cloud technology that has a huge skill gap. You can call yourselves cloud-native and multi-cloud developers with the vision that we have set of ourselves.

Compare to move to Java with CF 6 - making Enterprise developer

Services

On AWS and Azure, you will be able to use a common API interface across clouds to access

Storage eg S3

Database RDS, Azure SQL

NoSQL

Caching Eslatic Cache, Redis?

Messages/notifications SQS, push notifications

All this in less than 1/4th the code needed, say in Java using the Java SDK.

EC2, ECS

Serverless support?

Why: ease of coding, Multicloud

Can use Extra services - use in a cloud-aware way - but lack of portability - via REST so easy to call from CF. Expose Java SDK?

Configuration

The idea is to ease the configuration of servers or containers and applications in one centralized server. You no longer have to deal with CAR or migrate settings from one server to another through a manual copy of files. Everything will be taken care of by this centralized configuration using which you can push changes to all or some of your servers/containers/applications.

DevOps easier - scriptable deployment

Serverless

Tool to build CF runtime to deploy your serverless code on Amazon Lamda or Azure function.

All this happens across AWS and Azure to begin with. We will be a true multi-cloud solution.

Key is a small runtime and fast startup of CF

Ideally needs CF licensing on a per-second basis

Conclusion

We are supercharged with this vision. And we really hope you are as charged as we are as we ColdFusion to a whole new level in the coming versions.

70% of Fortune 500 using CF for app dev

New customers coming to CF

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

ColdFusion CommandBox vs Node.js (Dev Feature shootout), with Nolan Erck

From Local Dev to Production with CommandBox, CFConfig, and Docker

ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin

The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps) with Bret Fisher

Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell

Secrets From the Folks Who Make the Official Lucee CFML Docker Images, with Geoff Bowers

Getting started fast with Docker, with Mark Drew

Revealing the ColdFusion 2018 Roadmap details, with Rakshith Naresh

Adobe ColdFusion Specialist Certification (new at CF Summit), with Elishia Dvorak

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Ashish Garg

Dir of Eng for ColdFusion and e-Learning, 15 years at Adobe. Responsible for many successful projects. JRUN 4 years. 

Links

LinkedIn

Asgarg (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  00:00:01               Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Ashish Garg, he's the VP of, uh, one of the director of engineering. Sorry, gave you a promotion then accidentally. Um, and when we talk, yeah, you're welcome. And you will to this podcast because we're on this, it's an exclusive look at ColdFusion 2020 roadmap and we're going to be looking at all the exciting features that are coming up in, uh,