MICAH BAKER: Hello, and welcome to our session on how CoreLogic
is replatforming over 10,000 Cloud Foundry app instances
with Kf on Anthos and GKE.
I'm Micah Baker, product manager for Kf.
And I'm joined with our customer, Jeff Henry,
who will introduce himself in just a moment.
I want to share an exciting agenda with you.
It's actually covering some big topics at a high level
to talk about this journey that CoreLogic is going through.
I'm excited to get started.
And I'd love to introduce, Jeff, and if you could also
give us a little bit of background, Jeff,
on CoreLogic as a company.
JEFF HENRY: Yeah, sure.
Thanks, Micah.
As Micah said, my name is Jeff Henry.
And I lead the cloud solutions group for CoreLogic.
And what that is is basically I build and operate
the foundational platform services
in our cloud environment.
And I also lead all of our modernization and migration
projects.
Those of you who don't know who CoreLogic
is, CoreLogic provides data, services, insights to all
of the major mortgage lenders, insurance
carriers, and real estate agents so that they
can help their customers find, buy, and protect their homes.
We cover almost 100% of the US housing market.
And we serve probably about a million real estate
agents around the country.
So it's all about the property.
And we're looking to make sure that our services and our data
are served up on the right kind of platform.
And that's kind of why I'm here today, Micah.
MICAH BAKER: Awesome.
Thanks so much, Jeff, for giving us a little bit
of background on CoreLogic.
It sounds like there are regulations to deal with,
and you probably have some very specific objectives that you're
trying to accomplish.
So I'd love it if you could kind of talk
through the primary objectives you had, the business
drivers and strategy at play here with your journey off
of Cloud Foundry.
Do you mind talking through that?
JEFF HENRY: Sure, yeah.
I think, you know, the first and foremost area
that we're trying to achieve here,
the objective we're trying to achieve
is, we want to secure our long-term, scalable, efficient
application-hosting environment that's based on Kubernetes.
Kubernetes has been around for a long time.
We're not on it.
We want to be on it.
And we want to make sure that, when
we do start hosting our applications on Kubernetes
in production for our customers, it's
the best platform it can be.
That's the kind of biggest reason.
We have a lot of application-hosting platforms
today.
And we want to make sure that our future one is solid.
The other thing is we have a pretty deep relationship
with Google.
And we want to make sure we capitalize on that.
That was part of this adventure.
And then I think equally important is, whatever we do,
we want to make sure that the experience that our developers
and our operators have on their current platforms
is at least as good, but obviously should be better,
than what they have today.
MICAH BAKER: I particularly love that you're calling out
explicitly protecting the application team, the developer
and the operator, making sure that they're not
severely disrupted.
Because change management is an art,
I think, more than a science.
And so as much as we can get excited about strategic goals
like Kubernetes, which we definitely appreciate and hear
about all the time, but how you go
about doing that transition is just as important.
And that will be the aftertaste for the teams.
So I really appreciate that.
Before we get into more of the content on CoreLogic's journey,
I just wanted to quickly level set
on a few of the product names that we're
going to be talking about.
So Kf is a product that Google built
from the ground up natively for Kubernetes
to give a Cloud Foundry experience for developers
and operators without them having to learn anything
about Kubernetes.
So that's its purpose.
And so it fits right in with the objectives, Jeff,
that you just mentioned earlier.
So people are used to using a CLI called CF.
If they had a command like cf push,
then they use a command kf push instead.
What it looks like in a big picture view is replatforming.
So we take these workloads that are Cloud Foundry
specific running on the legacy Cloud Foundry infrastructure
that's VM-based called BOSH.
And we just want to take those same applications
and deploy them on Kubernetes.
And that's where Kf comes in.
So we're making minimal changes higher up the stack
for the developer and operator, but more
of the significant change happens at the platform level
while we're trying to abstract it away
from those application teams.
And then when we talk about Anthos,
we're talking about GKE outside of Google Cloud.
So customers may need a GKE experience
in other public clouds.
They may need it on on-prem data centers,
or attached clusters, et cetera.
So this is the platform that Kf may or may not need to use.
Kf could work just on GKE.
In this case, CoreLogic is using Anthos for on-prem workloads
as well.
So Kf is running Anthos on-prem in addition to GKE.
So Jeff, as we mentioned at the beginning,
there's always going to be some unexpected challenges that come
along with any major project.
This has significant scope, so it's not a surprise
that there were some challenges that we've
run into along the way.
Could you give a quick summary of how you see these challenges
as they relate to the objectives we talked about earlier?
JEFF HENRY: Sure, yeah.
You know, one of the objectives I mentioned
was finding a new sort of platform
that's based on Kubernetes.
And there really hasn't been that many challenges there.
Kubernetes has been around for a while.
GKE is pretty solid.
I mean, obviously there's challenges with everything
you do, but nothing huge to talk about there.
It was more about making sure we have
a smooth transition, right, from one platform to another.
Some of the things that we found there are the existing platform
has some things that come out of the box, like caching.
We use Redis for caching.
It comes out of the box in our current platform.
It does not come out of the box in Anthos Kf GKE.
So we've had to come up with an alternative for that.
It's Redis Enterprise.
And getting that installed and configured and working with Kf
and seamlessly transitioning from an application
from using Redis out of the box to using this new form of Redis
was a bit of a challenge.
Some of the other things that we've seen
are, even with some of the things that do come in the box,
like config server, configuring that foundational component
of the platform is not something that happens very often.
And figuring out how to do that in the new platform
versus the old-- a bit of a challenge there.
And then I think even bigger than both of those
maybe was trying to make sure that our CI/CD automation was
seamless.
And to make it seamless, we have to change
the actual script and the commands that
are in those scripts.
And that has been one of the bigger parts of the effort.
MICAH BAKER: Thanks for those summaries, Jeff.
I think those are really helpful.
I recall the Redis caching in particular
being an interesting challenge because the applications
were reconfigured at the time they were deployed
on Cloud Foundry with the out of the box Redis
that came with that to not use encryption
because it was already on an isolated network.
But introducing TLS encryption for those same applications
without changing the applications,
that's a fun challenge.
But that was an example where we were
able to leverage the Anthos ecosystem with Anthos service
mesh to automatically upgrade those applications to use
TLS encryption for anything that they communicate to the Redis
Enterprise cluster.
So no app code changes were required for that,
but that was a very interesting challenge.
And then as you said, with config server, getting it up
and running is straightforward.
But making sure that you have the same configuration that
was in use before with the old foundation and the way
the apps were using it, that could be another story
just because it's not something that you're
working on every day.
And so finding knowledge experts who
understand how it was all connected originally
might be a challenge.
But these are good examples of the kind
of challenges that we've run into and been
able to resolve quickly.
It's a good example of working together through the broader
ecosystem to address those.
But I'm sure this won't be the end of our challenges
that we run into, and we'll continue
to address things, whatever comes up in the future.
Could you talk a little bit, Jeff,
about what led you to trying to meet your objectives that we
talked about earlier with Kf and Anthos on GKE and maybe some
about the timeline and what happens next?
JEFF HENRY: Sure.
Well, I think we've kind of been talking about it a little bit
with your description of Kf and some of my comments.
But we believe that Kf is the avenue
to get to that smooth transition that I've been talking about,
right?
So if we were to make the jump to Kubernetes,
just cloud native Kubernetes directly
from where we are today, it would be a little bit more
difficult to say the least.
And Kf provides that smooth transition for us.
The other piece, the reasons why we're
kind of going the way we're going,
is we have a very deep partnership with you guys,
with Google.
And it's a good one.
And GKE is a solid platform for Kubernetes
where we feel like we can gain the operational efficiency
that we're looking for.
And then those two things combined,
I think that we're really kind of seeing
that we have a shorter migration timeline ahead of us
than we might have otherwise.
And so this is a bit of a snapshot of that timeline.
We've been working for the better part of this year
on getting the foundational components, like networking
and other sort of layers of the architecture and design set,
building out the platform, and getting it to a point where--
right now we're actually working on,
I mentioned, the issues or the challenges
that we had with some of the out of the box
backing services, one of which was our caching tooling.
Right now, we're working on making sure
that we have an alternative smooth transitional way forward
on all of the backing services.
And so that's kind of what we're doing now.
And then leading into the rest of Q3 and Q4,
we've got to do all of the testing that we need to do.
The functional testing, we've kind of
gotten through most of that.
And we're coming up on now doing some really chaos testing
and performance testing to make sure the platform is solid.
And then as you can see, we're expecting
that we'll go through several waves or tranches of migration
efforts next year and that will last us pretty
much throughout the full year.
MICAH BAKER: It's great.
I think that breaking it into these cohorts based
on the characteristics of the applications is very strategic.
And also, planning for a self-service migration
driven by the application teams is also a good way
to balance the availability of the platform team
with the investment needed from an application team,
since they still need to be able to adopt the thing that they're
migrating to.
Kf is just part of the overall journey.
And it's certainly not like the only workload.
Where do you see this going over time?
Like, we finished this timeline that we're seeing here.
What's your longer term objective for these workloads
after you get them to Kubernetes?
JEFF HENRY: Well, so these workloads that we're
kind of focusing on here in this conversation
are Cloud native applications, right,
that run in that type of hosting environment.
We're mimicking that with Kf and on top of Kubernetes here.
And that's kind of what we're focused on.
But the GKE platform that we're building
and we have the Anthos framework around
is really bigger than that.
It's meant to also host our off-the-shelf software.
As more vendors provide off-the-shelf software that's
deployable in Kubernetes, we intend to use it for that.
We intend to use it for our burstable analytical workloads
that are batch type of workloads that don't fit in a Cloud
Foundry Kf world.
So we're looking to use GKE and Anthos
for all of our workloads, not just the Kf-based workloads,
but some of these other ones that I've mentioned.
And we're really looking forward to it.
And I think we'll be doing that, kind of proving those out
in parallel, with this migration plan next year.
So that's the story, Micah.
I appreciate and thank you very much
for letting me tell it to you.
And thanks for your partnership on this effort.
MICAH BAKER: Thank you, too, Jeff.
This was really enlightening.
I think a lot of folks will benefit from hearing
about your journey.
It's certainly top of mind for a lot of people trying
to figure out how do I get from point A
to point B and land on Kubernetes.
It's quite a lot to figure out for a lot
of different customers.
So thanks for joining us, all of our viewers.
I hope that you appreciated this session
and hope that you enjoy the rest of your time
at Google Next '21.