and you're shown a list of your account's applications; the list includes the application's state (stopped or running), a description, and associated CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources. Finally, the Support tab is a jumping-off point for 3tera's documentation, release notes, and support forum.
All the action is on the Applications tab. Select an application and the AppLogic editor opens. The application is represented as a network of nodes on a canvas. Each node is an appliance, populated with input and output connection points called "terminals." If you want, say, a Tomcat appliance to send database queries to a MySQL appliance, you drag and drop each onto the canvas, then drag a connection line from the output terminal of the former to the input terminal of the latter. It's a lot like wiring circuit components. An "appliance palette" waits to the side, from which you can drag new appliances onto the canvas and wire into your application. Right-click on an appliance, and you can configure its property values and attributes.
To actually configure or tweak the internals of an appliance, you log onto it. (Remember, an appliance is an OS running an application.) A secure shell window opens, from which you can execute Linux commands to your heart's desire.
The glue that cements appliances into applications is ADL, the Application Description Language. ADL is very much like XML, but less repetitive and devoid of brackets. It is used to describe all the components (appliances) that comprise an application, as well the structure of the appliances themselves. A complete description of the language is available on 3tera's AppLogic wiki.
3tera's version of cloud services is a "virtual private datacenter" (VPDC), executing on hardware hosted by 3tera itself. Pricing for a VPDC depends on a mixture of factors -- CPU, RAM, and storage requirements. Or, if you already have hardware in place and want to construct your own AppLogic installation, you can purchase an Enterprise AppLogic License. In either case, you should contact 3tera for details.
Enomaly ECP
Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) is not a tool for deploying to existing clouds such as Amazon Web Services. Like AppLogic, Enomaly ECP is a tool for building your own clouds. It is erected on a set of open source virtualization applications and APIs. You can construct your own cluster of systems, install ECP, and use its UI to manage the configuration, storage, and deployment of virtual machines. At its core is Enomalism, a virtual-machine management system written in Python that uses MySQL as back-end storage.
[ Ready to take a step into AWS but not sure where to begin? Read InfoWorld's "Inside Amazon Web Services" and "Hooking your apps into Amazon Web Services."]
The ECP user interface is a console that operates the mechanics of the tool's underlying system, which is, in turn, undergirded by the open source libvirt virtualization API. libvirt is a C toolkit that allows applications to communicate with the Linux kernel's virtualization capabilities, and thereby control hypervisors running on the system. The hypervisor is the virtualization software that allows a computer to host one or more OSes -- each in its own virtual environment. Currently, libvirt supports Xen, QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox, and others. (For more information, see libvirt.org.)
Currently, there are three versions of ECP: the free, community edition (which I tested); the Enterprise edition; and the new Cloud Service Provider edition, which adds usage accounting and billing integration to the user interface. Check the Enomaly Web site for details of the editions' differences.
ECP's management console is arranged along the same lines as the other consoles in the roundup. It is browser-based, with tabs for each of the major functions. The console opens to the obligatory Dashboard, which is really a transaction monitoring page. All operations performed in the console are transactions. They can be issued asynchronously, and some may take minutes to complete, so the Dashboard lets you
Post new comment