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Cloud Orchestration with Cloudify
Music Maestro
A new generation of orchestration tools is rising to the challenge of configuring VMs in complex, real-world scenarios. Cloudify [1] is an orchestration solution that promises customers an easy and uncomplicated approach to leveraging the benefits of services in the cloud.
With other tools, such as Chef or Puppet, admins can build a cloud environment from scratch with just a few mouse clicks. The cloud platform takes care of the details, leaving the users to just start and stop the VMs.
Although starting and stopping VMs might not seem like very much work, it can quickly escalate, especially when customers want to put the features of a cloud to optimal use. For example, assembling an environment for web servers would mean starting the individual VMs from the designated images and spending a full day configuring them. If you turned off this configuration and needed it again a year later, the work would start all over.
Chef and Puppet only work well with more static setups, where it's clear in advance what the configuration should look like at the end. The open source Cloudify truly automates the process of configuring VMs in the cloud, supports various types of public clouds, and is under active development.
Start as PaaS
GigaSpaces, the company behind Cloudify, began developing the tool in 2012. Cloudify was originally designed as a tool for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) applications (although the boundaries to SaaS are fluid). The basic idea was to give users a quick and easy way to start specific programs or services within a cloud computing environment.
Currently, Cloudify targets customers who launch prebuilt appliances in cloud environments and want to operate their own services quickly without dealing with the technical underpinnings. The vendor offers prebuilt templates and images that you can enable in
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