What Kept Us Busy – A Cloudify Update

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Hope you enjoy the read,
Tamir Korem
tkorem@cloudifysource.org
Cloudify Evangelist
www.cloudifysource.org

Cloudify Recipes Repository

We now have a new Cloudify-recipes repository on GitHub, for easy access to all of the Cloudify recipes.
It contains several application recipes (many more recipes will be added soon).
In each recipe folder (service or application) there’s a README.md that contains the following attributes of the recipe:

• Status: Tested / Incubator
• Description: A short description of the recipe
• Contributors: A list of names of the developers who contributed to the recipe.
• Build: A full url of the distribution zip file in which this recipe has been tested.
• Permissions: Whether special permissions are required on the cloud’s VMs.
• Release date: The date in which the recipe was last tested and released.

Obviously, the README.md file also contains a description of the recipe and of the features in it.
In order to contribute to this repository, you can create a GitHub fork and when you’re done, send us a pull request and we’ll merge it once we approve it. So go ahead – contribute your own! 

New Chef Integration
We have been working hard to offer Cloudify users integration with the DevOps tool Chef, you can find it here.  On that note, we recently hosted a webinar with a demo of how to do-it-yourself, you can watch it here.
For those who are not familiar with Chef, it is an excellent tool for setting up your environment and automating complex IT processes. It promotes the concept of DevOps and managing your infrastructure as code, for the setup phase.  The concept of DevOps and recipes can now be taken beyond setup, to actually accelerate the entire lifecycle of your applications, from setup, to monitoring, through maintaining high availability, and auto-scaling when required with this integration.
We’ve now opened up Cloudify to Chef users by enabling you to specify Chef recipes and roles for installation and configuration of Cloudify services.
We’ve also created a Chef-Server recipe in case you want to use your private Chef server on the cloud. As always all the source files are open under Apache2 and you can find them in our github recipes repository.

Pet Clinic and Apache Load Balancer
The Pet Clinic recipe has been enhanced and it now contains an Apache Load Balancer service (apacheLB). We’ve also created a built-in load custom command in the apacheLB recipe, which will enable you to test the application under heavy loads; providing a scaling rules mechanism out of the box with this recipe.
Please note that the apacheLB has been added to the extended PetClinic application and NOT to the PetClinic-Simple, because we wanted the PetClinic-Simple to remain… simple. But if you need it, you can easily add the LB service recipe to the PetClinic-Simple.
More info can be found in:

• The PetClinic recipe in GitHub.
• The Apache Load Balancer recipe.
• EC2 Quick Start guide

Other News in Short

In order to ensure accurate documentation across versions, from now on, you’ll find documentation versioning with every article in the Cloudify guide.
At the bottom of every page in the guide you will find a version label (see example below).

Pages that describe new or modified features, now contain version options in a drop down menu (see example below).  By selecting your version, you will then automatically be redirected to that version’s page.

A new Rackspace cloud tutorial has been added to the documentation in the community, for both bootstrapping and configuration.

The Cloudify download process has been simplified – and no longer requires authentication, to give Cloudify a try. So go ahead and download your version of choice here – pain free.

Travis CI for Cloudify Builds
It was important to us to have Cloudify users know what’s going on behind the scenes at all times, and to increase the transparency of our work, so we have started using Travis CI for our Cloudify builds. Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community, that provides status tracking Cloudify’s builds at every moment. We’ve also integrated this tool with our GitHub repo – so you will always be able to find the status of Cloudify’s builds there as well.
Help us make Cloudify awesome! We have published the Cloudify roadmap so you can know about all the features that are in the works, see it here, where your votes on features and feature requests are most welcome.