Build your own cloud with antMan

Workers

Building a private cloud is time consuming and complex. Some use OpenStack, but many OpenStack projects fail because companies underestimate its complexity. antMan does not rely on OpenStack – or any of the other major open source applications for private clouds – but brews its own potion. The tool claims that you just need to install antMan on one or more systems. The rest of the setup is then easy, and the process is largely automated.

Ants Everywhere

Before I get started, a brief clarification of the terms used in the context of antMan will be useful. For the most part, they are contrived and have something to do with ants. The likelihood of knowing the technical terms used here is pretty low if you have never used antMan before. antMan is not, strictly speaking, the name of the Linux distribution on which the product is based. Rather, it is the entire product and the software for managing the physical nodes, which is the core of the product, so to speak. As described here, a Linux distribution named edgeLinux [1] is specially adapted to the needs of this setup. The antHill is the vendor's central registration page, where each newly installed antMan instance is registered with a separate product key.

antMan also distinguishes between antsles and antlets . In terms of content, the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. An antlet is a virtual instance. The product supports legacy full virtualization with KVM and Qemu and uses the LXC container format propagated by Canonical (but not very well established in the market). In contrast, an antsle is a hardware appliance that the vendor offers bundled with antMan. They come in versions named One, Two, and Nano and are aimed at different user groups.

I won't deal with antsles in this article, but it doesn't hurt to have heard the term.

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