monitor their progress.
The Virtual Infrastructure tab leads to three control areas. First, the Infrastructure control provides a navigation pane for all the clusters in your cloud. Select a cluster, and you can view all its assigned virtual machines. Buttons across the top let you start, stop, pause, or delete a virtual machine within the cluster.
Next, the Virtual Network Manager control panel assists in creating and managing virtual networks within your clusters. (This control is not in the community version; it was in a testbed system that Enomaly gave me temporary access to.)
Finally, the Elastic Valet is a control panel for provisioning machines. You select a target cluster for the machine, and specify launch parameters. The Elastic Valet will determine which physical machine in the cluster is the best destination to "park" the virtual machine -- hence the tool's name.
[ Application development has taken to the skies. See the InfoWorld Test Center reviews, "Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .NET" and "Google's high-flying cloud for Python code." ]
Another important component of the ECP control panel is the Repository, which is a storage management system for OS images and plug-ins for the Enomaly system itself. (The latter is typically supplied as Python eggs.) The Repository recognizes both local and "remote" machine images. Remote images are available from Enomaly's central servers; you can select a remote image and have it downloaded to your local system. At the time of this writing, there were about 10 images, including Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, and others.
Hard-code developers will enjoy the Enomalism API selection from the Admin tab. This provides a list of the REST-style APIs that Enomalism supports. Select an API, and you're provided with a structured definition of the parameters and data types for that API.
ECP is simply not there yet. Or, if it is, it hides the fact behind its meager documentation. Though I was able to install and run the community edition on Ubuntu, whenever I got something to work, I could never be certain whether I had done the right thing or had simply stumbled into a solution. More importantly, ECP appears to be lacking in tools that assist in the configuration of machine instances. That is, it has nothing analogous to RightScale's RightScripts or Kaavo's system definition file. For now, it appears to be good for managing virtual machines in a cluster of networked hardware, but provides little support for applications on those virtual machines. Hopefully, this capability will appear in a future release.
Kaavo IMOD
Kaavo's Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD) seeks not only to abstract the individual servers running on cloud-based system, but -- as much as possible -- to erase the boundaries between tiers. That is, with IMOD, you can work with a multitier application as though it were a monolithic application, without losing the ability to fine-tune constituent parts.
All the information needed to deploy an application is gathered into a single file, called the system definition file. Crack the file open, and you'll find what looks like a description of a state machine. The IMOD engine executes this file, booting the different tiers of an application in proper order. The file can also specify corrective action to be taken if a tier somehow fails to boot. Each tier specified in the system definition file consists of one or more servers. When you configure a particular tier, you specify the number of servers on that tier, and IMOD lets you manage them as though they were a single system.
The system definition file contains two major sections. One defines the static artifacts of an application (tiers, servers). The other is a flow control section that specifies the actions that the IMOD engine is to perform when the application is being launched. These actions are defined in the form of Velocity templates -- Velocity being a scripting technology that allows you to embed Java
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