You can use the resources in this topic to create a BOSH release that integrates a software service with VMware Tanzu Operations Manager at the managed service level.
A BOSH release is a directory that contains the source code for your service with everything else that BOSH needs to deploy it to cloud VMs running a specified operating system (stemcell). These contents include but are not limited to, buildpacks, start up scripts, binary artifacts, and a BOSH manifest containing configuration and deployment properties.
The BOSH manifest specifies the following major components:
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Packages that must be installed on VMware Tanzu Operations Manager stemcells to create VM images.
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Jobs that describe how to install, run, and remove your software.
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A Monitor script, that describes how to monitor the health of your service components and stop or restart them.
BOSH Resources
These topics give more details on BOSH and BOSH releases:
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BOSH Documentation is the top-level contents page for BOSH documentation.
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BOSH Problem Statement explains what BOSH does.
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BOSH Basic Workflow lists the high-level steps for creating a BOSH deployment.
Creating a BOSH Release
These topics explain how to create a BOSH release:
Shortcut: Start with Docker images
If you have already packaged your service as Docker images, you can emulate a managed service deployment using the Tile Generator support for docker-bosh packages. You can deploy existing Docker images into BOSH managed VMs on the VMware Tanzu Operations Manager infrastructure.
While this is a great, easy way to deploy your service on VMware Tanzu Operations Manager, we do not recommend this as a long-term, production-ready solution. There is really no benefit of running your service in containers on the VMs, and it does have a number of operational (“day 2”) drawbacks:
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You introduce more software (Docker) which must be kept up to date, and has the potential for problems, downtimes, and security vulnerabilities.
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You can no longer take advantage of the patching capabilities of VMware Tanzu Operations Manager for stemcells and application dependencies, for example, frameworks, and libraries. Instead, you become directly responsible for managing all software that is in the Docker images you deploy.
Enhancing the BOSH Release
After the basic BOSH release is in place, additional features for logging help you run the service.
For logging information, see syslog-release.
Expose the property syslog.migration.disabled using the tile’s forms because you might not configure syslog draining.
Logs written under the expected BOSH location /var/vcap/sys/log are forwarded to the configured syslog server by the release. Integrating syslog forwarding into a tile does not require code changes. It only requires including the release and configuration forms in the `tile.yaml file. For an example, see pcf-examples/tile-for-bosh-with-syslog.
BOSH Backup and Restore
The BOSH Backup and Restore Developer’s Guide describes the framework for release authors to add backup and restore capability. to their release by using BOSH Backup and Restore (BBR).
