Announcing the Diego initiative

[Mark Kropf]

Hey vcap-dev,

The runtime team is launching a new initiative to take on rewriting/rearchitecting the DEA.  We're calling this initiative "Diego" as we anticipate do much of the rewrite will be in Golang :)

The team spent a couple of weeks thinking through the existing problems with the DEA and brainstorming ideas for architecture-level changes that could alleviate these problems and pave a path towards greater flexibility and stability.

These thoughts were summarized and presented to all our cloud foundry developers and we'd like to share these ideas (in the attached Doc) with the vcap-dev list at large.  We're eager to hear feedback and want to preface our initiative with the simple fact that none of this is set in stone: we're hoping to take an incremental approach to this rewrite and will be able to make course-corrections along the way.

To that end, we'd love to hear about use-cases/problems you have today that are in tension with our proposed direction.

Finally - to set clear expectations: not all of the ideas in the presentation are things we'll be taking action on soon.  Our first goal is to tackle the problem of "staging" and take that responsibility out of the existing CC/DEA codebase.  Along the way we'll be striving to make Diego as stack-agnostic as possible - moving any stack-specific code into a plugin-style architecture.  We hope this will give our users the flexibility to augment/tailor the staging/running process without having to modify any Diego code.  The proposed RunTimeController API outlined in the presentation is more future-facing -- and will probably not land any time soon!  But we think that it represents an important shift towards a cleaner, more flexible, interface between CC and the runtime components and towards a cleaner mental model of what it means to stage and run applications on cloud foundry.

We welcome your input on both the doc and movie that we are attaching in this post. We're locking this thread so that the conversation can continue in the google doc comments.

Send us your thoughts!

- The Diego Team

Diego 101 Doc

The Game Video