JBCNConf - A great new conference in Barcelona

I just returned from Barcelona, after having a great time at the JBCNConf 2015 conference. Its the first big Java conference in Barcelona, and there was more than 220 people attending coming from 40 different countries.

JBCNConf 2015 - A great new conference has born in Barcelona

I was there with my fellow colleagues from the xPaaS team. We arrived on thursday and the speakers dinner was down at the beach so we had a nice walk towards the place, where we then enjoyed some beers and tapas.

We are walking at the beach towards the speakers dinner at the beach

Speakers dinner at the beach

The conference started on friday morning and James Strachan kicked off the event with the keynote where he presented Kubernetes for Java developers. As usually James does a brilliant job at presenting.

James Strachan giving the keynote about Kubernetes for Java developers

I then watched a few talks such as Bartek presenting vertx, and Jean Babptiste talked about Apache Karaf. vertx 3 is really looking impressive, and I would like to see how Apache Camel can become a plugin in the vertx family. We do have a camel-vertx component today but I feel its more for Camel needed to call into an external vertx event bus. The idea for the Camel vertx plugin would be to flip this around, so vertx developers can easily use Camel and it would feel all natural in the vertx family.

Apache Karaf 4 is on the way, and its great to see some of the ideas from fabric8 1.x has found its way into the core of Karaf. And hopefully they make Karaf easier and better as a immutable container that fits modern times with docker/linux containers.

Then it was lunch time which is tapas in the square outside which is really nice.

Lunch time outside in the square with nice tapas

The xPaaS team chilling out in Barcelona, where Rob is making final touches on his slides before his talk

After lunch it was Rob Davies to present ActiveMQ in the cloud and how the fabric8 MQ module makes deploying and scaling messaging in the cloud much easier. Rob demonstrated an autoscaler functionality where MQ detects that if the number of brokers are under more pressure to handle the load, then it can automatic scale up and down new brokers, and re-shard the queues across the brokers.

Rob Davies talking about scaling ActiveMQ with fabric8

After Rob it was myself to present. And of course it is about Apache Camel, and it was a similar talk as I did 2 weeks ago in London. However this time I had time to polish and improve a few areas. For example we have managed to get the centralized logging to work, so I could show the logs from the pods in real time in the nice kibana console. There room was almost full and about 10% of the audience have heard about or used Camel. So its great to be able to present Camel to new users.

Claus presenting Camel. Yes Camel is awesome as micoservice in docker containers ;)

At the end there were a few questions from the audience, and one from James himself. He hasn't seen the Camel forge addons working in IDEA. So he was curious to see more what it could do. So we spend 5 minutes extra demonstrating how the tool easily can edit or add endpoints, where you get a UI wizard that has a form to fill out the options.

The slides for my talk has been posted on slideshare.

James Rawling was also with us, but this time he 'got lucky' and didn't have to do a talk. A bit of shame as his knowledge and experience with CI/CD is really interesting. Every customer and organization we talk to want such a solution. And with fabric8 and kubernetes we have built that using the most popular open source software, such as jenkins, gogs, nexus, sonarcube, taiga, gerrit and so on.

Then it was late in the afternoon and we went for a 'business meeting' in a cafeteria nearby. It is surely lovely here in Spain that all those cafeterias often have beer on draft. After the 'meeting' we want back to the conference to join the networking and party event on the square in the campus. It was great fun to speak to more people and hear about what they do. And that they are eager to learn more about the new cool stuff such as kubernetes, docker and fabric8.

Later in the evening we went out for dinner and then grabbed a jin and tonic at the local tavern that we had discovered yesterday which was located nearby our hotel. Yes we never leave a good opportunity wasted - some of the cool stuff that we have implemented over the many years has initially started as an idea on our many road trips.

The next day I went back to the conference for the 2nd day. I attended a few talks in the morning.

Manning has sponsored 5 Camel in Action books. So before I had to leave I signed those books, that later will be used in a raffle as a give away to the lucky winners.

Book signing with my impressions of the conference

Because the Camp Nou football stadium was only 1.5km from the event, I walked down there, and did the stadium tour. As I had to leave to the airport in about 1 hour, I had to rush a bit the tour. There were a lot of people and kids where they all the time had to stop and take photos and selfies.

Claus at the Camp Nou football stadium, home of FC Barcelona

Here at the end I want to congratulate the BarcelonaJUG for an amazing well organized conference. I really enjoyed it. It was laid back and great atmosphere. Hope to be there again in 2016.

On twitter I noticed they posted a photo of the top-5 talks. Its great to hear that our talks was well received. Also I was placed one spot higher than my boss ;)

Apache Camel in space ... erh in Docker and Kubernetes and fancy fabric8 web console

I have just recorded a 5 minute video that demonstrates running an out of stock example from Apache Camel release, the camel-example-servlet packaged as a docker container and running on a kubernetes platform, such as openshift 3.

camel-servlet-example scaled up to 3 running containers (pods) which is easy with kubernetes and fabric8

In this video I have already deployed the example and then demonstrates how we can use the fabric8 web console to manage our application. And also connect to the running container and see inside, such as the Camel routes visually as shown above.

Then I run a simple bash script from my laptop that sends a HTTP GET to the Camel example and prints the response. The script runs in a endless loop and demonstrates how kubernetes can easily scale up and down multiple Camel containers and load balance across the running containers. And at the end its even self healing when I force killing docker containers.

So I suggest to grab a fresh cup of tea or coffee and sit back and play the 5 minutes video.

The video is hosted on vimeo and can be seen from this link.

Returning from Microservices Event in London

I just returned from our recent event - Microservices Architecture Developer Day - which happened in London.

It was a great day and I enjoyed hearing the stories about Apache Camel making a difference and being used in all sorts of industries today. It was great to see that almost all registered turned up so that people would have to stand up in the back of the room. Though we had the RH employees to stand up so you all had a chair.

Packed room at the event.

The event started with James Strachan giving the keynote about docker, kubernetes and microservices is a great combination and has such a huge potential for the way we develop and think about services, deployments and applications.

James Strachan talking giving the keynote

I took over and talked about Apache Camel, and how did live demo how in practice you can developer Apache Camel micro services from scratch, and dockerize your projects and run them on a kubernetes platform with openshift 3 (you can use vanilla kubernetes platform). As preparation for this talk I recorded two videos as backup in case there was trouble doing the live coding at the event.

Claus Ibsen talking about Apache Camel and microservices

A talk that gathered great interest was Marc Savy and Kurt Stam's talk about api management. First Marc gave an overview of the apiman project, and Kurt did the live demonstration showing this in action.

Kurt and Marc presenting the apiman project. Notice Kurt is wearing the apiman tie from the project logo ;)

James Rawlings did a fantastic talk about a sometimes underestimated area, but that is becoming more and more important for business. How to get their software quicker into production. That topic is sometimes captured as DevOps and the continues integration / deployment movement. And couple that with social aspects and event notifications delivered easily to the people. And then the culture change and people problems that come along when organizations has the change to embrace this. I really enjoyed hearing about James war stories and demonstrating the CI/CD pipeline that fabric8 offers a single one click installer.

James Rawlings talking about DevOps, CI/CD, microservices and culture and people problems.

After lunch there was break-out sessions where we hosted a BOF talking about integration, microservices, fabric8, Apache Camel, JBoss Fuse, et all. It was a great interest and we had great and honest discussions.

At the same time Jimmy Dyson took the stage and presented logging and metrics with fabric8. When you see this for the first time you are a bit amazed. That you can get centralized logging and metrics collected from all your pods. The web ui is using the very popular Kibana for logging and Grafana for metrics.

Jimmi Dyson talking passionally about logging and metrics

This was a talk I would have loved to attend. Jimmi is a very knowledge and passionate engineer.

After the BOF there was a few talks focusing on classic JBoss projects such as Wildfly and developing microservices. Marc Little presented the Wildfly Swarm project - which looks really promising. Just hope they also get around making it appealing for the non JEE developers, and make Apache Camel integrated out of the box. Arun Gupta then talked about microservices, patterns and developing that with JBoss. I didn't catch this talk as I was engaged in hallway conversations with Camel users and people keen interested in fabric8.

The last talk I watched was Roland's talk about Maven and Docker. Roland just joined our xPaaS team and its great to hear about what the maven-docker-plugin can do, and how it makes dockerizing Java projects much easier.

Roland Huss talking about Docker and Maven about the docker-maven-plugin

And we also had time to do a few selfies with fellow Red Hatters.

The last talk of the day was about mobile, but as it was beer-o-clock a bunch of us skipped and went for the bar ;)

Of course there is beer after the event.

For interested parties I suggest the following reading order:

• Kubernetes for Java Developers - slides
• Microservices with Apache Camel - slides
• Microservices with Apache Camel Live Demo - video part 1
• Microservices with Apache Camel Live Demo - video part 2
• Watching James Rawlings silent video (he will do a recut with voice-over later)
• Logging and metrics with fabric8 - slides

As all events was recorded and slides is handed over to the organizers. Then I assume they will process this and later publish the material. However it may be behind a registration page. The above content is 100% FOSS ;)

The next day as my flight was at 5pm, we had a sight seeing day. Myself and Ioannis walked the streets of London. All the way from Paddington, through Hyde Park. Passing the Buckingham (the queen was not home to see us) and then as a 2nd choice we went to 10 Downing Street, but the guards didn't accept our RH credentials so we went pass Big Ben, and to the London Eye. But at that point we was tired of walking so we headed back to Embarkment on the foot bridge, to catch the tube to Paddington for the express to Heathrow.

Buckingham Palace

On a closing note I really enjoyed the day. It felt like the good old FuseSource events where all the talks was from engaged developers talking passionally about the upstream projects and communities. There was no sales pitch or mandatory slides about the RH or JBoss Middleware products. Thank you for that. As the event was such a success I have been told that they want to arrange this again, but sooner than having to wait a full year.

Apache Camel doing IoT to help measure air quality in the streets of France

Today I read a very interesting blog post from Abdellatif Bouchama, about a system he developed in less than a day, that gathers air quality metrics from IoT devices from the cities of France, and then using MQTT protocol gathers the data using ActiveMQ message broker, and then process the data using Apache Camel, inserting the data into an Elasticsearch database.

IoT devises sending air quality data over MQTT to A-MQ broker for further processing by Apache Camel - Using JBoss Fuse product.

When data are in Elasticsearch there is lovely web consoles such as Kibana that can present the data in geo graphical displays.

Geo graphical display using Kibana to highligh the cities with air quality data

I encourage you to continue reading this blog from the original posting at bushhorn. The post is here.
The source code of this is posted on github as well.

PS: Yes the Camel route is only 3 lines of code (4 if you add the log statement) ;)

Well done Abdellatif.


PS: If you are interested in more about IoT and Apache Camel, then there is the new community project called camel-labs that provides a number of Camel components and tooling around this very topic.