NSX Lucky Draw App for Events

If you have been to be my NSX sessions or experience days, you probably might have seen this NSX Lucky Draw App that I created for my demos. I have been asked a few times to share this application and also over last year or so when I deal more with containers, I always wanted to “dockerize” my lucky draw app. BUT… due to my busy schedule with VCDX-NV, I keep putting this off. With now VCDX defense over, I am all set to finish this task.

Since VCDX is all about WHY? Let me share why I created this app. When I just join VMware as a NSX Specialist, I was privilege to attend the NSX Tech Summit and I watch some of cool demos and that inspire me to create something cool that I can use in my demos. Additionally, I also expect to have many speaking opportunities as a NSX SE, so if I can some wow demos, that would help me as well. At the same time I’m also learning vRealize Automation(vRA), so I was also learning how a developer can use vRA to create a testing or staging environment to create an application, something similar to this lucky draw app. So this application actually allows me to learn like Multi-Tier Application blueprint in vRA for example. I also manage to practice my PHP skills after a long time since my last final project at university which is based on a PHP project. In short, this app allows me to achieve so many things.

So this is how it looks like from the user point of view. This is the page where the user will enter the URL on their mobile phone and enter their name and Lucky Number.

I also created a result page where it refreshes every 2 seconds so when you are running the lucky draw during your presentation at the event, you can view the people who submit their entries real time. The audience or user can enter more than one entries.

Then when the time I give the audience time is up, I will click on Lucky Draw button, one winner will be pick from the list.

OK. So the above gave you an idea of how this app works. I use this in various of my NSX demos such as the Cross-VC NSX where I have this app running at one DC and I vmotion this application from one DC to another while the audience are busy keying in their lucky draw entry.

In a vRA demo, I also have this application as one of the blueprint and I show customers how this multi tier application (comprises of one or two Web VMs and one DB VM) can be provision in matter of minutes.

So now, I got a write-up on this lucky draw app that I created. Its time for me to clean up the code, probably post the PHP in github. Step number two will be create the docker containers that already has the lucky draw application running in them, probably one apache container and one mysql container. My ultimate goal is to be able to use this application in all the Cloud Native Apps Platform such as PCF, PKS, Kubernetes and Openshift and NSX-T demos that I will likely to be doing moving forward.