cf-release for OpenPOWER

In a previous blog, we had described the availability of a Cloud Foundry BOSH stemcell and release binary for OpenPOWER systems (based on the IBM POWER microprocessor architecture). In this blog, we will describe the availability of a cf-release binary tarball (BOSH release for Cloud Foundry) for OpenPOWER. We will also describe steps to build cf-release from source and deploy it using BOSH to OpenStack on OpenPOWER systems. This cf-release can be used to build and test buildpacks for OpenPOWER. The buildpacks included in this release are not POWER specific. We will show an example of a simple buildpack for POWER that can be deployed on this release.

This cf-release binary tarball can be deployed using the same steps as described in the document: Deploying Cloud Foundry on OpenStack with only a few changes.

1. Step 2 was covered in our earlier blog
2. Step 3. “Deploy Cloud Foundry”, detailed further in the document: Deploying Cloud Foundry, need the following changes
   1. In step i. Upload a Stemcell, we used the stemcell for OpenPOWER as described in our previous blog.
   2. In step ii. Build the Cloud Foundry Release, this pre-built release binary (version 240) for OpenPOWER can be used (i.e. bosh upload release http://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/ppc64el/ubuntu/14_04/cloud-foundry/cf-release-240-ppc64le.tar.gz).
   3. Alternatively, the latest version of cf-release for OpenPOWER can be built by replacing only a few binary blobs (for the x86_64 processor architecture) in cf-release with the corresponding ones for OpenPOWER (ppc64le processor architecture). This document describes the steps in more details.
   4. The deployment manifest can be built by customizing this example manifest.

The following screenshots depict the output of the bosh deploy process.

We are now working on creating Concourse pipelines to continuously build the latest versions of cf-release for OpenPOWER and buildpacks built for the POWER processor architecture. The following steps show how we verified our cf-release deployment.

 

First delete all the pre-configured buildpacks (which are for the x86-64 architecture), download the Cloud Foundry cli for OpenPOWER from here:

Build and upload a ppc64le buildpack, for example, we have described steps to create a IBM Node.js buildpack for OpenPOWER in this github project and  cf push a sample Node application:

With contributions from Yulia Gaponenko, Konstantin Maximov and Indrajit Poddar from IBM