

Announcing PoolParty, An Open Source tool for managing EC2 clusters - progprog
http://blog.citrusbyte.com/2008/6/5/announcing-pool-party
PoolParty is an open source tool that automates deployment, monitoring, and load balancing of EC2 instances.
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toffer
It's worth keeping an eye on this as well:

"Vertebra: A Next Generation Cloud Computing/Automation Framework"

<http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/06/02/introducing-vertebra>

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SwellJoe
There hasn't yet been a "first generation cloud computing automation
framework", so it's kind of impossible to be building the "next generation".
That first generation is pretty much what everybody in the field is working on
(including my company).

But Vertebra sounds like an interesting approach for the applications where it
fits. And repurposing an existing protocol for RPC is always interesting,
they've chosen the surprising, and novel, XMPP (we use a light-weight RPC
mechanism that runs over HTTPS that was already part of Webmin, with a
fallback to SSH on instances that don't have Webmin or Virtualmin). And
they're addressing a niche that no one else is addressing, which is Ruby on
Rails in a cloud environment...it could be done with Amazon using SQS to
detect rising "pressure" and ramping up new instances as the pressure rises
and shutting them down as the pressure decreases. But, Vertebra being focused
on RoR probably means that if you're building a RoR app, you'll need to spend
a couple of days less time developing that aspect of your deployment. You
still have to solve the database scaling issue, and the data sharing and state
problems, just like any other large scale deployment...but one less thing to
worry about _is_ one less thing to worry about. (And nobody is going to solve
all of those other problems automatically.)

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ezmobius
Actually Vertebra is not tied to Ruby on Rails at all. Since the main
communication is all XMPP based, _any_ language that can speak XMPP that
implements our protocol can become part of the XMPP cloud. Our first
implementation of the agent framework is written in Ruby but I expect many
more languages to be supported.We will be releasing at least python and erlang
based agents along with our ruby agents. We will be releasing the whole thing
open source once we have locked down the protocol and made it a XEP standard,
so keep an eye on my blog if you are interested.

Also Vertebra is not just for server automation, it is a framework for
distributed computation of many kinds as well as a real time application
platform.

The discovery mechanism and Resource based dispatch will allow for
applications to get a request, discover via a Vertebra call which backend is
least loaded and offers the request processing you need and then dispatching
said request to the proper backend. Also allowing for map/reduce and
scatter/gather style programming.

I have many ideas of where to take this thing and I cannot wait to get it out
in the open so I can see what other folks do with it.

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SwellJoe
"Actually Vertebra is not tied to Ruby on Rails at all."

Interesting. I just assumed because of the connection to Engine Yard, and you
know what happens when one assumes.

"We will be releasing the whole thing open source once we have locked down the
protocol and made it a XEP standard, so keep an eye on my blog if you are
interested."

Will do. While we have our own implementation for solving quite a few of the
common cloud infrastructure problems, we're also agnostic and configure dozens
of other tools without feeling the least bit guilty about having multiple ways
to do things (must be our Perlmonger background), and it sounds like you're
addressing things that aren't in our current scope. (For example, we support
Xen, VServers, Zones, and EC2, and S3 and ZFS...we're loco like that. We don't
even care.)

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foca
This is probably the biggest disappointment EC2 brought: this kind of stuff
should be built into the service :-/

So, thumbs down for Amazon for not providing this basic piece of
functionality, and kudos for the developers who are behind this.

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aaronblohowiak
You are exactly incorrect. Amazon is providing the raw materials on which an
innumerable combination of strategies and implementations can seek to fulfill
these ends. the fact that they are not pigeonholing you into just one is
great. it is taking more time to develop open source workable solutions, but
will result in a much richer ecosystem overall.

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bprater
Is this Rails specific?

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progprog
No, it adheres to the principles of AWS very well. So you get: \- distro-
agnostic \- language-agnostic \- framework-agnostic

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bentreflection
ah hell yeah! bout time someone made EC2 autoscale. thanks!

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aaronblohowiak
at least one company already has (rightscale.)

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bauser
Cool!

