Hi All,
At the CCC, and in jira [1] late last year, we started discussing this
feature request, but going foward we'd
like to get broader feedback. A couple folks have suggested we bring it
back to the mailing list to get this.
In brief, we're responding to a desire for high-level composite
blueprints on top of Cloudstack. For instance:
(a) An app team wants to have a single entity in Cloudstack which
represents their application,
consisting of a load-balancer, a scalable appserver tier, and a
SQL database
(b) A middleware team wants to have a mechanism for describing a
PaaS which they can
deploy, manage (e.g. scale out, back), track costs, and destroy
as a unit in Cloudstack
These get mapped on to Cloudstack components (IaaS and services), but
what distinguishes them from Projects
is that they are reusable portable definitions. This is similar to what
VMware have in vApp and AWS in CloudFormation;
but there is (so far) a preference to base these around CloudStack
concepts and have them accessible in the GUI.
Cloudsoft (me and others here) want to work on this, together with
like-minded folks.
Here are some feature ideas for starters:
* IaaS mapping
- ability to refer to specific templates and offerings (eg id="1234")
- ability to refer to portable descriptions of templates and offerings
(eg os("ubuntu"), userdata("myappsrv"), minram("2gb"))
- ability to define subnets, DNS, public IP and firewall rules
* Wiring
- ability to write files to VM's with permissions, mode, etc
- ability to embed references to other blueprint entities (ie other VM
IP's/hostnames) in such files
- ability to execute commands on VM's, with order constraints
- ability to use puppet/chef/bash/juju/cartridges/brooklyn (e.g. via the
above capabilities)
* Management
- ability to access blueprints and deployments via REST and via GUI
- ability to define clusters and groups of entities (which could be scaled)
- ability to deploy policies (eg elasticity, HA/DR logic) to various
management systems
What would you like to see? Would you be able to help?
Many thanks,
Alex
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-576
