Cocaine (PaaS)

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Cocaine (PaaS) is an open-source platform-as-a-service system that was designed to help developers build and host cloud applications. It aimed to be as capable as Bluemix, Google App Engine, or Heroku, but with its own approach to deployment and services.

What Cocaine is
- A configurable PaaS that lets you create cloud-hosted apps.
- Supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, including C, C++, Go, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Node.js.
- Provides built-in services so you don’t have to manage external infrastructure (e.g., storage and HTTP utilities).

Key features
- Language and framework flexibility: write apps in various languages; Cocaine handles the cloud deployment.
- Native services as part of the platform: Storage using Elliptics, a URL fetcher, and a service that detects user region/language and analyzes HTTP headers for device characteristics (Uatraits).
- Manifest-based deployment: you push your code and a manifest; Cocaine manages deployment, load balancing, scaling, and fault tolerance.
- Versioning and isolation: multiple app versions can run simultaneously; testing happens in isolated cloud environments to prevent impact on other apps.

How it works
- The cloud consists of machines running the Cocaine server (Cocained). Users interact through a load balancer and the app name, not the underlying machines.
- Developers don’t worry about infrastructure details; they just push code and provide a manifest.
- The platform handles infrastructure concerns such as databases and HTTP clients via built-in services that feel like native language modules.
- Cocaine aims for reliable, high-performance messaging, automatic scaling, and responsive, user-centric apps.

History and impact
- Cocaine was created by Andrey Sibiryov, inspired by Heroku. While Heroku started with Ruby support, Cocaine sought broader language support and better documentation.
- It began as a personal project but was later used by Yandex to support millions of requests per second.
- Key facts: initial release in 2011; stable release noted as 0.12.14.21 (November 29, 2017); written in C++; licensed under LGPL-3.0; GitHub repository at cocaine/cocaine.

Why it’s notable
- Cocaine aimed to simplify building scalable cloud apps by providing a ready-to-use cloud environment with built-in services, automated deployment, and seamless version updates.
- It illustrated an approach to PaaS where developers focus on code and features while the platform handles deployment, scaling, and infrastructure details.