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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

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 ...

hosting apps that are similar to Bluemix,

Google App Engine Google App Engine (also referred to as GAE or App Engine) is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports aut ...

, 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 product, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional database schema, schemas. Released in February 2009 by 10gen (now MongoDB ...

storage, and a

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

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 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 sapph ...

. 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 Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

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 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 HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 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, wher ...

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 A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), usually defined by a formal language. Languages usually provide features ...

( C, C++, Go,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, Python,

, and others) and frameworks ( Node.js). 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

* * * * {{Cloud computing Cloud platforms Yandex software