Cocaine (Configurable Omnipotent Custom Applications Integrated Network Engine) was an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

PaaS system for creating custom

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...

hosting apps that are similar to

Bluemix IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

Google App Engine Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers. ...

, or Heroku. Several services have already been implemented this way, including a service for detecting a user's region or language, a service for accessing

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Serve ...

storage, and a

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

fetcher.

History

Andrey Sibiryov, the original developer of Cocaine, got the idea from Heroku, another cloud PaaS. At that time, Heroku only supported applications developed in

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sa ...

. Using Heroku, the developer could create a Ruby app and push it to the cloud, while Heroku handled infrastructure and load balancing issues. Sibiryov was not satisfied with the documentation for Heroku and decided to create his own PaaS system. Initially, Cocaine was a personal project for Sibiryov. This changed, however, when Yandex discovered an internal need for a scalable platform that could cope with millions of requests-per-second (RPS). Cocaine was, for a period of time, used in the Yandex infrastructure.

Architecture

The cloud is made up of one or more independent machines that have the Cocaine server (Cocained) installed. Users know nothing about the location of the services they are accessing—only the address of the

load balancer In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenl ...

and the app name are available to them. User requests are sent to the load balancer, which passes them to the cloud. In the cloud, the optimal machine is selected for each request, and then the request is executed. The infrastructure details and the app's environment settings are hidden from the developer, as well. The developer only needs to send the code to the cloud and write a special manifest for executing the code. It is not necessary to set up anything else, such as databases, key-value stores, or

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

clients. There are services that do this, which from the programmer's point of view are native modules for the programming language the code is written in. For example, the Storage service lets users access Elliptics storage, and the Uatraits service uses data about a client's user agent and its HTTP headers to determine the characteristics of the device that sent the request.

Applying the technology

In the cloud, apps can be written in various programming languages ( C, C++, Go,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

, and others) and frameworks (

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

). Cocaine bound to a web server provides an automatically scalable deployment environment for web apps. The cloud manages large data volumes through a streamlined interface. Cocaine ensures reliable, high-performance message transmission with fault tolerance. Its load balancer enables responsive user-centric systems. Cloud apps run independently, supporting multiple versions and smooth user transitions to updated versions. Additionally, apps are tested in isolated cloud environments, preventing errors from affecting the physical system or other applications.

References

External links

* * * *{{Citation, url=https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/free_cocaine_giveaway_from_russian_search_engine_yandex/, title=Free Cocaine giveaway from Russian Search Engine Yandex, newspaper=The Register, date=2013-10-17 Cloud platforms Yandex software