Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley 2017

Node.js is becoming increasingly more popular with 7 million users per month and growing at a rate of 100% year-over-year. Although the application platform is attracting a lot of new developers, it is also attracting Java, Ruby and Python developers, especially as more enterprises explore microservices.

Node.js is a dynamically typed language and if you are trying to approach this application platform like Java, Ruby and Python, you are bound to fail.

This presentation will provide an overview of why Node.js is the right choice for PaaS and how best to approach this language if you are a traditional Java, Ruby or Python developer.

Node.js is the fastest growing runtime used in Cloud Foundry. If you’re just getting started with building Node.js applications for Cloud Foundry, you may have a lot of questions about best practices for this runtime environment. How can you test an application locally? Should you push your package dependencies, or let the staging machine download them? Should you be pushing your Node.js applications as Docker containers? How do you deal with private packages? How do you debug your application?

This presentation will cover these questions and more, by building a new Node.js application designed to be run in Cloud Foundry. Existing Node.js developers will probably learn a trick or two as well!

The Bluemix UI (which runs on CloudFoundry) is the front-end to Bluemix, IBM's open cloud hosting platform. The original implementation as a single-page, monolithic Java web app brought with it many demons, such as poor performance, lack of scalability, inability to push small updates, and difficulty for other teams to contribute code. Over the last 2 years, the team has been on a mission to slay these demons by embracing cloud native principles and splitting the monolith into smaller Node.js microservices. The effort to migrate to a more modern and scalable architecture has paid large dividends, but has also left behind a few battle scars from wrestling with the added complexity cloud native can bring. The team had to tackle problems in a wide variety of areas, including: large-scale deployments, continuous integration, monitoring, problem determination, high availability, and security. Tony Erwin will discuss the advantages of microservice architectures, ways that Node.js has increased developer productivity, approaches to phasing microservices into a live product, and real-life lessons learned in the deployment and management of Node.js microservices across multiple CloudFoundry environments. His war stories will prepare you to wage your own battles against monoliths everywhere -- happy slaying!

Building microservices using Node.js? Hristo and Stoyan stood up to this challenge and had some hard time while working on Abacus, an open source metering service. Join this session to learn from their experience with how to avoid their mistakes.

The speakers will start by going through the pitfalls of microservices and distributed systems, including how you can troubleshoot and solve typical failures. Next, they will present our Node.js toolset including custom networking modules, Hystrix/Eureka/Turbine integration, and the Mozzle/Riemann/Influx/Grafana monitoring stack that help us build, debug, deploy, and monitor their application at scale on Cloud Foundry. Finally, they will outline how neural networks and the new container networking feature could help with operating such applications.

After attending this talk you will be ready to take a full advantage of these ideas and tools to build scalable and resilient applications.

Digital transformation is more than a buzz phrase. Learn how companies are evolving to Cloud, systematically leveraging existing workloads on their current platforms for competitive advantage. This session explores the transition to Cloud using Node.js technologies and unlocking the power of your existing data sets and what you can expect from the Node.js Foundation and community moving forward. See how the ability to start on known and familiar platforms and environments and to maintain a bridge to data on these platforms using new technologies like Node.js can be one of the keys to success of the move to cloud native.

Come learn about the work IBM is doing to ensure to that:
- Node.js is available across platforms and environments
- that key tools and capabilities are available (monitoring, post mortem investigation)
- you can leverage existing datasets in your cloud native applications using the IBM SDK for Node.js is based on the Node.js™ open source project. It provides a compatible solution for IBM Power™, Intel® and z Systems™ products that require Node.js functionality and package management.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be the difference between applications that just perform tasks and applications that seem truly intelligent and intuitive to humans. With cloud platforms like IBM Bluemix and Amazon Web Services, AI is as accessible as ever to developers through provided and hosted APIs. These cloud platforms also allow simplify the process of using AI with other powerful cloud services such as IoT, big data, messaging, and serverless functions.

Hardware systems are unique in that they are able to collect real-time data from their environments with various sensors. These systems can become even more powerful and perceptive when this data can be rapidly analyzed with machine learning models. A basic detection system will send an alert when it detects any kind of motion near the sensor, but an intelligent system “knows” what the detected object is. Using image recognition, it can classify the moving object as human and even make a trained guess at what emotion that human was feeling at the moment it was detected.

In this talk, Linda Nichols will describe how a real-life use-case (pets jumping on the kitchen counters) evolved from a simple motion detector to an intelligent and inexpensive cat detection system. Using IBM Watson IoT Platform and Node.js, she was able to connect a Raspberry Pi with IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk functions and IBM Watson image recognition APIs. She will demonstrate how her system can quickly and reliably notify owners when it detects a cat, but ignore other categories of moving objects. She will also discuss how she was able to reduce the complexity of the system architecture and the amount of static code stored on the Raspberry Pi by using “serverless” IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk functions.

You can hire a team of people to man your website customer chat widget around the clock - or Cybrid Industries can give you a turn-key chat experience using cognitive abilities backed by Cloud Foundry and IBM Watson technology. In this session we'll show you how we've built a company delivering turnkey chat services that integrates seamlessly into your website. It even uses your industry lingo to answer common customer questions, sell your product, and convert visitors into leads. As a startup, easy to use cloud services and unlimited scalability matters, which is why we've built our application on Cloud Foundry with Node.js. We’re using socket.io to enable real-time live chat that is integrated with Watson’s cognitive system. With a firebase database, an angular front end app, and express.js for distribution, we'll take you through our thought process, from development, to results, and success. Replicate our story in your own successful venture!

In this session, Erin will demonstrate how the open source LoopBack framework can be used to rapidly prototype, and deploy, REST APIs. LoopBack is easy to use and extremely configurable, making it useful in nearly any environment. Erin will demonstrate how to install, start up, and use LoopBack as well as how APIs are defined and customized. Multiple examples will be shown to help the audience see how LoopBack can be used in production.

While microservice architectures offer lots of great benefits, there’s also a downside. Perhaps most notably, there is an increased complexity in monitoring the overall reliability and performance of the system. In addition, when problems are identified, finding a root cause can be a challenge. To ease these pains in managing the IBM Bluemix UI (made up of more than twenty microservices running on CloudFoundry), we’ve built a lightweight system using Node.js and other opensource tools to capture key metrics for all microservices (such as memory usage, CPU usage, speed and response codes for all inbound/outbound requests, etc.). In this approach, each microservice publishes lightweight messages (using MQTT) for all measurable events while a separate monitoring microservice subscribes to these messages. When the monitoring microservice receives a message, it stores the data in a time series DB (InfluxDB) and sends notifications if thresholds are violated. Once the data is stored, it can be visualized in Grafana to identify trends and bottlenecks. Tony Erwin will discuss the details of the Node.js implementation, real-world examples of how this system has been used to keep the Bluemix UI running smoothly without spending a lot of money, and how it’s acted as a “canary” to find problems in non-UI subsystems before the relevant teams even knew there was an issue!

Come to this session to discuss strategies for adopting node.js technologies.

Innovation is critical to both survival and evolution in all industries; In today's app driven economy, IoT and Cognitive computing are at the forefront of innovative application development patterns. Forward thinking ideas, rapid iteration, and adoption of new technology come together to transform how problems are solved, and how value is created. What’s this have to do with Node.js and Cloud Foundry? Well, the combination of Node.js and Cloud Foundry is a perfect conduit for driving that innovation. In this session, come see how an unmanned aircraft (aka "drones") is combined with computer vision and machine learning with IBM Watson, and scalable cloud runtimes to transform how industries work, today, highlighting a new insurance use case which enables companies to handle claims faster, safer, and with less error than ever before.

Do you usually pay to develop your Node.js app in a cluster from a cloud provider? You won't do that anymore after you see how you can develop locally in a cloud environment. You will see how using minikube can help you scale your app along with how you plan on updating apps in real time.

There are many ways to become a part of the Node.js ecosystem, but not all of them allow developers to jump in equally easily. A tool reducing the infrastructure development process to minutes would definitely make the process smoother. In this talk, Eugene is going to share his experience with Bluemix Live Sync—an IBM Bluemix service synchronizing local changes to a cloud workspace—and describe how it can be used to set up your IT infrastructure and development environment for building Node.js applications.

Caching keeps the data in memory that either slow to calculate or originate from another underlying back-end system. In this presentation, you will see how to leverage Hazelcast as a distributed cache for Node.js applications. Hazelcast is an open source, elastic, self-balancing, self-healing and highly available in-memory computing platform provides fast, reliable access to scalable in-memory data. This hands-on talk will enable you to get started exploring Hazelcast for Node.js and give your project a jump start in speed and scale.
In this talk, will be covered:
- How distributed caching works in general.
- Capabilities of Node.js client.
- Real world use cases and best practices.

Smolder is testing framework written in NodeJS and ReactJS for checking the health endpoint of all the apps running on Cloud Foundry. The health tests are executed by Concourse pipelines. Apps can implement their own health endpoint and the Radiator Dashboard pulls the health data using Websockets to show the current status. Concourse pipelines are driven either on a CF Event, like buildpack update or stemcell or service update or periodically every few minutes. Everyone needs to know the health of apps running on CF when something changes underneath, and this testing framework provides the answers. We are using this in Ford and other CF customers.