Minimum Viable Cloud Platform

[Chris Greene]

I am trying to get a Kogito project that is under development into a cloud solution so that multiple users can start to test and provide feedback. However, it appears that OpenShift, which seems to be one of the most highly recommended cloud platforms in the Kogito Documentation, is massive overkill for this. I has many more features and a lot more overhead than I was expecting, at least as far as I could manage using the documentation I found. 

What is the smallest, lightest cloud platform I can host a Kogito App on? My initial thought would be to just fire up a t2.nano or the like in AWS EC2 and just run the Binary there, and treat it like a remote dev environment, but I don't know if that would interfere with some kogito features. What would your approach be for just getting some Kogito code running in a cloud setting?

[Matteo Mortari]

Hi Chris,

I can understand any answer from me will likely contain some bias, but I want to share my honest opinion on this, and rest assured it's given from the perspective of "a Java dev" without any specific knowledge just-because working for Red Hat or any special insights.

If I were in your shoes, I would at least give a shot to the RH Developers OpenShift Sandbox: https://developers.redhat.com/developer-sandbox/get-started

To provide more details, that is what I'm personally "defaulting-to" these days, when I also make some demo of Kogito running on cloud (latest example, here).

The reason I say this, is to potentially avoid the following:

1. you start to rent a VPS, only to later face yourself with the manual provisioning (install JDK, etc.) and manual management (ensure app is running as daemon, and it keeps running!)
2. then you might need to apply several changes iteratively based on feedback; you may look then into Containerize the app, but now the problem is just shifted into managing the Docker or the likes
3. then you will likely want to industrialize how you manage your containers and at that point you will be interested in Kubernetes
4. then you will likely want to industrialize how you manage your K8s

By the time you have explored a custom or alternative solutions between 1-4, you could have just opted on OpenShift directly or at least given it a shot first hand, before starting what anyway will be a journey :)

If you really don't want any Containerization at all ever, I would at least consider easing the tasks in 1 with Ansible.

In summary, if that helps, the personal approach I take for demos/testing is the following:

1. I try to deploy on RH Developers OpenShift Sandbox if possible
2. For alternative testing scenarios still involving demo recording, I use CRC on a fixed server/computer running Fedora
3. If I'm only testing locally some specific code, I usually get the job done with just a minikube on a MacBook

I hope I have provided at least some interesting considerations for your use-case.

I'm positive other colleagues, community members and users might have additional considerations!

I'm looking forward to reading them.

MM

On Tue, 22 Mar 2022 at 22:36, Chris Greene <ch...@chuboe.com> wrote:

I am trying to get a Kogito project that is under development into a cloud solution so that multiple users can start to test and provide feedback. However, it appears that OpenShift, which seems to be one of the most highly recommended cloud platforms in the Kogito Documentation, is massive overkill for this. I has many more features and a lot more overhead than I was expecting, at least as far as I could manage using the documentation I found. 

What is the smallest, lightest cloud platform I can host a Kogito App on? My initial thought would be to just fire up a t2.nano or the like in AWS EC2 and just run the Binary there, and treat it like a remote dev environment, but I don't know if that would interfere with some kogito features. What would your approach be for just getting some Kogito code running in a cloud setting?

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[jr...@redhat.com]

I think the answer really depends on your needs. Since you said you just want to host it for development/test purposes and you don't need any OpenShift feature/capability (and I guess you don't expect much load on such application), then I would suggest to do the following: 

1) start the application locally, play with it and then check the resource usage (because it really depends on your application and the models you are using)
2) if the resource usage is reasonably within the t2.nano limits, then go for it. 

*if it's only for dev/test*, then I think it's reasonable to start small and scale up in case you need more resources.  

*if it's for production*, then the answer would be much more complicated. 

Best, 

Jacopo

[Chris Greene]

Thanks for your inputs, I'll definitely look into the OS Dev Sandbox, I might have jumped in the deep end of openshift before. If that still looks like more than I need for the sandbox, I'm glad to hear it's at least within the realm of possible.

[Rhett S]

hiya, You do not need OpenShift to use Kogito. the basic kogito app (SB or Q) can run in a container, and that container can run anywhere. anywhere. in azure, in Aws, in gcp, anywhere. in AWS, kogito purrs on ECS or EKS (EC2/Fargate). AWS App Runner is likely the easiest container service out there. though not cheap. 

Kogito has many optional features that align with red hat cloud offerings.  but those optional features are optional and just because you dont need those optional features, don't let that detract from the power and value of Kogito. 

if you're looking for cheap, I think you can create a new email address, and signup for AWS and you will have AWS free for 12 months. (though, seems like a hassle to me)

R

[Andrew Lion]

yep, in the middle of this journey right now via AWS/EKS