Cloudify 2.2 and Roadmap

Hi Cloudifiers,

It’s always fun to tell you about new features and possibilities. This time it’s double the fun, as we debut a new version, but are already working on another one that will be coming out pretty soon.

Let’s start with version 2.2. I think the icing on the cake of this version is the integration with the OpsCode Configuration management tool – Chef. For those of you that have never heard of Chef, or have never used it, I recommend having a look. We chose to integrate with Chef, as we believe it is the most advanced configuration management tool out there

. Chef has many community cookbooks for almost any open source middleware out there. So using Chef to install and configure your application tiers saves you tons of work and formalizes your installation process.
Taking DevOps on the Cloud few steps further, Cloudify will orchestrate complete applications and multi-node Chef-based deployments.

The Cloudify integration with Chef can use Chef for the installation of each node, while maintaining SLAs and making sure your application is always up, and in healthy condition.
Take a look at the Chef Integration document and the travel example application.
Other cool features in version 2.2 include:

• Tail logs on CLI – Accessing logs on different VMs while troubleshooting on the cloud can be exhausting. Now you can now tail any Cloudify log simply using the Cloudify shell.
• View recipes in the web UI – You are responsible for an application in production and need to review the recipe actually running this application. No sweat, you can browse the deployed recipes from the web GUI.
• Run Cloud driver templates that can run as Sudo – You can execute recipes as Sudo running your service on a privileged template.
• Setting OS variables using a Cloudify Cloud Driver template in case your service needs to set specific variables for one reason or another
• REST API for the Cloudify attributes API – So you can access / modify attributes from shell scripts. This allows you to share dynamic information between recipes.
• Azure IaaS Cloud Driver to support the new Microsoft offerings.

Now version 2.3, coming in December, is about further facilitating application deployment. We are working on an “override” feature allowing you to override any configuration property in any recipe or cloud driver template at install time, so different users can install the same recipe with different parameters without repacking the recipe.
Another important aspect of 2.3 is multi-tenancy. We are enhancing Cloudify’s security to authorize user actions according to their role and group (tenant if you will).

This will provide the required level of security and isolation between different applications deployed and managed on the same Cloudify controller.

More information about version 2.3, and further roadmap discussions to come in my next post…stay tuned.
We welcome your feedback regarding new features; there already more than a few requests in the forum, so help us decide what matters most.
Yaron
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