BOSH release resources

This topic provides resources you can use to create a BOSH release that integrates your 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 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:

• Packages that must be installed on VMware Tanzu Operations Manager stemcells to create VM images

• Jobs that describe how to install, run, and remove your software

• A Monitor script, that describes how to monitor the health of your service components and stop or restart them

BOSH Resources

These documents provide details about BOSH and BOSH releases:

• BOSH Documentation: the top-level contents page for BOSH documentation.

• BOSH Problem Statement: explains what BOSH does.

• 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:

• Creating a Release

• Defining your Jobs

• Defining your VMs

• Defining your Runtime Configs

• Monitoring the Health of your Service

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 way to deploy your service on VMware Tanzu Operations Manager, this is not a good long-term, production-ready solution. There is really no benefit to running your service in containers on the VMs, and it does have a number of operational (“Day 2”) drawbacks:

• You introduce more software (Docker) that must be kept up to date, and has the potential for problems, downtime, and security vulnerabilities.

• You can no longer use 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 contained in the Docker images you deploy.

Enhancing the BOSH release with logging

After the basic BOSH release is in place, additional features for logging help you run the service. For information about logging, see syslog-release.

Considerations:

• *xpose the property syslog.migration.disabled using the tile’s forms because you might not configure syslog draining.

• Logs written under the 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 by using BOSH Backup and Restore (BBR).