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.
Automating Cloud DeploymentsTags: cloud, open source
