Running multiple processes in a Cloud Foundry container

Question

I'm writing a custom build pack for Cloud Foundry to run a third-party application over which I have no control. This application (C/C++) executes code defined in metadata (configuration). It also hosts a JRE so that it can interact with Java code. The application does not communicate over HTTP. It instead uses a proprietary protocol to send messages to it.

To utilize Cloud Foundry's routing and elastic scaling, I'm writing a Java web application whose purpose is to:

• Listen on $PORT for incoming HTTP requests
• Forward HTTP requests to the application using its protocol

I understand that it's not best practice to execute multiple processes within a container, but, is there a way of specifying multiple commands to execute in parallel and have Cloud Foundry:

• Forward each process's output
• Monitor if any child process dies and restarts the whole container if it happens
• Gracefully shuts down all the processes when scaling down/stopping/restarting, etc.

Answer 1

Here is a simple reverse proxy in Go. http://www.darul.io/post/2015-07-22_go-lang-simple-reverse-proxy.

Go is easy, if you already know C or C++. The code is straight forward and Cloud Foundry comes with Go buildpacks. It will make it a lot easier to run in Cloud Foundry.

Give it a try.