One of the promises of Cloud Computing is the ease of spinning up new instances and adding them to an existing application allowing for elasticity, but actually doing that in practice is anything but simple. Increasing the complexity would be adding another dimension of wanting to accomplish this across multiple cloud vendors. This is important for some SAAS vendors that want redundancy or just for organizations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. An open source project by Red Hat called DeltaCloud shows the promise of on day allowing this, but the functionality of actually configuring a running instance is not addressed. RightScale has a number of Ruby Gems that addresses the same problem as DeltaCloud, but again, it falls short on configuring a running instance. These two projects will probably progress together since DeltaCloud actually uses the RightScale Gems under the covers. A project that handles configuring running instances well is Cloud Tools which powers Cloud Foundry for SpringSource. Cloud Tools provides a simple way to configure running instances in complex deployments which even includes setting up replication between 2 database servers. The downside is that it only works for Amazon’s EC2. Since all of the projects are open, jamming them together could be a powerful combination and may be necessary as cloud deployments become more complex across providers.
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Automating Cloud DeploymentsTags: cloud, open source
Dunno how you can say that RightScale doesn’t address the configuring of running instances. I started RightScale in 2006 precisely for that: dynamically configuring instances at boot time as they come up so they can be integrated into running deployments. The gems we provide in open source form are just the lowest layer of our infrastructure. We actually also publish our RightLink agent as open source which supports the dynamic configuration. A number of our customers are running postgres in the cloud and use RIghtScale to automatically configure the instances.
Thorsten,
Your service certainly does do dynamic configuring of running services, but it through RightScale that this is accomplished. If someone wanted to deploy an N-tier architecture on EC2 without your service, your Gems would only get them part of the way there. Don’t get me wrong, you provide a very valuable service, but today, there is no FOSS project that allows people to dynamically deploy and configure complex architectures across multiple cloud vendors without a service such as RightScale.