Cloud Native Buildpacks

I have recently heard a new thing in CNCf space called Cloud Native Buildpacks and in this blog, I will help you to understand what I know about them in simple words.

What is CNB’s:

Have u ever wondered how we can transform our application code to Container images without the use of Dockerfile and docker compose.

• The CNB project was initiated by Pivotal and Heroku in January 2018 and joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an Apache-2.0 licensed project in October 2018.

• Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs) transform your application source code into container images that can run on any cloud.

• With buildpacks, organizations can concentrate the knowledge of container build best practices within a specialized team, instead of having application developers across the organization individually maintain their own Dockerfiles.

• This makes it easier to know what is inside application images, enforce security and compliance requirements, and perform upgrades with minimal effort and intervention.

Features of CNB’s:

• It auto-detects your code's programming language and its version

• Advanced Caching

• Images can be built directly from application source without additional instructions.

• Supports more than one programming language family.

• Image contains only what is necessary.

• Leverage production-ready buildpacks maintained by the community.

Pre-requisites:

• AWS account

• An Ubuntu EC2 machine t2.micro (t2.micro is ok, if you are using simple application)

• Docker installed

Steps:

Create an AWS EC2 machine of ubuntu OS with type t2.micro.

• Update your machine

sudo apt update

• Install docker

sudo apt install docker.io -y

• Provide permission to ubuntu user to docker group

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER && newgrp docker

• Install pack utility to build image

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cncf-buildpacks/pack-cli
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pack-cli

Clone your code

git clone https://github.com/AnilKumar-Noolu/NodeJS-todo-app.git

• Go inside the directory

cd NodeJS-todo-app

• Remove Dockerfile and docker-compose file to make sure we are not using it for building the image.

rm -rv Dockerfile
rm -rv docker-compose.yaml

• Run the following command to get the pack builder

pack build suggest

• You can choose any of the Suggested Builders available. In my case, I’m going ahead with Google builder. So copy the google builder and paste in the below command

pack build --builder=<your-builder-from-above-command> node-todo

Here node-todo will be the name of the container image we are building.

This build will take some time be patient.

• After build, check images

docker images

• Run the image as a container

  

docker run -it --name nodeapp -p 8000:8000 node-todo

This application runs on port 8000, that's why we mentioned 8000 in the above command

• Open port 8000 from the security groups and access your application

http://<public-ip>:8000

Congratulations!!! you have deployed and application using Cloud Native Buildpacks.