I love micro cloud foundry.  I spend a fair bit of time on airplanes, and I hate not being able to work because my internet connection is flaky in some hotel room so being self sufficient when I am doing dev is critical. So good thinking, and thanks Cloud Foundry team.

Micro cloud foundry is designed to be the self-standing companion to cloudfoundry.com and this recent blog post indicates that the team is working to keep micro-cloud in synch with cloudfoundry.com. Coolness.  But what happens when I want a self-standing “micro” version of cloud foundry that doesn’t match up with cloudfoundry.com, but rather a customized cloud – one that, say, has additional services available?  Off the top of my head I can think of two basic approaches – 1) Customize micro cloud foundry or 2) Create a single node cloud foundry to run locally and install your customizations in there.  I’ll explore #2 a bit more in another post, right now I want to poke on #1 a bit.

I have spent many afternoons over the last couple of weeks perusing my micro cloud VM including reading a lot of ruby code and from that have reached a few conclusions (please speak up if you think I’m misguided on any of these):

• Micro cloud foundry is created by the folks at VMWare as a BOSH release that puts all the components on a single node.
• In addition to the cloud foundry components it also has a few bits specific to micro cloud foundry like the code for the console and offline mode.
• The directory structure that contains all of the bits is complex – lots of links from parts of the tree to other parts of the tree.
• On first startup entries are created in the embedded sql-lite DB – these are essentially installing, or better put, enabling certain parts of cloud foundry – for example, the available services have entries placed into the database.
• Hacking micro cloud foundry to add additional services (i.e. for Cassandra) is pretty much a no go – I tried.  This is why the cloud foundry team created BOSH – doing these types of things by hand is awful. And I don’t even know all of the steps that need to be taken even if I was crazy enough to try it anyway.
• I should point out that existing documentation for how to create custom services basically hacks into an existing deployment – none of those instructions match up with micro-cloud and the docs for adding services to BOSH-based deployments starts with “get the cf-release” – more on this in a second.

I’m convinced the right approach to creating a new version of micro cloud foundry is to get the micro cloud foundry bosh release, add my new service in there, do a bosh deploy and then take the resultant VM as my micro cloud.  In other words, pretty much what that doc for adding services to a BOSH-based deployment prescribes.  I’ve been digging around github, found repositories for micro, services-base and services but haven’t been able to find anything like mcf-release (a version of cf-release specifically for micro).

What I am trying to do here is an important part of the whole PaaS development paradigm – anyone else interested?

I’ve posted a short question here – keep an eye there for any responses.  I’ll keep posting on the subject as well.