Community Update – Sep 19th 2012

Hi Cloudsters,

Just a quick update on the things we’ve been working on lately:

 Chef Integration

We have been enhancing the integration with the DevOps tool Chef.
For those who are not familiar with Chef, it is an excellent tool for setting up your environment and automating complex IT processes.
Chef automates common installation and setup tasks, and similarly to Cloudify, promotes the concept of DevOps by allowing you to manage your infrastructure as code.
The integration allows 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.
The recipes can be found here. For a complete documentation of the integration, click here.


  New Recipes

Five new recipes have been added.
We have quite a few recipes in mind, and we’d be happy to hear your input. Let us know what technologies you use most and help determine the next set of recipes we will implement.


New Service Recipes:

Play FrameworkPlay framework is an open source web application framework, written in Scala and Java, which follows the model-view-controller architectural pattern. It aims to optimize developer productivity by using convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.
For more info, click here.
MySQL
We created a MySQL recipe that users can very easily use, inherit or even extend, just by changing one properties file, without changing even one line of code in the recipe.
This recipe also has two very useful custom commands:
  •  mysqldump – Enables users to create a database snapshot
  •  query – Enables users to invoke any sql statement.

For more info, click here.

New Application Recipes:

Jboss-PetClinic

The “good old” PetClinic application, only this time it’s with JBoss.

This recipe shows how to deploy and run a JEE web application on the JBoss app server.

For more info, click here.


Travel-lb 
An application recipe for the famous Spring Travel sample application, demonstrating how to add an Apache load balancer to your application stack.
This recipe deploys the travel application and is comprised of three services : Tomcat, Cassandra and ApacheLB.
Each Tomcat instance registers itself to the ApachLB and the travel application can be accessed from the ApacheLB URL.

For more info, click here.

Play Framework “Computers” Example
This is an application recipe for the Computer database Play! framework Sample application.
For more info, click here.


Additional Features

  We’ve Added Global Attributes

The global attributes are a set of attributes that are shared across applications, services and service instances. In other words, these attributes are accessible from any application or context.

Users can set or get the global attributes just like any other context attribute in Cloudify.
Here’s an example of usage : context.attributes.global[“myKey”] = “myValue”
We also have an entirely new set of CLI commands that enable users to access these attributes from the CLI.
These CLI commands are:

  • set-attributes
  • list-attributes
  • remove-attributes

  REST API for Attributes

Up until now, Cloudify’s attributes could only be set and read from a recipe (groovy file) or through a ServiceContext object. Attributes are now exposed over the REST API, and can therefore be used from any REST client.

For more info about this, visit our community site.


Better Modularization of Recipes

We added a new feature that enables users to break their recipes into multiple files, and load external files into their service descriptor file.

For more info, click here.


    Support for the New Azure IaaS API

The Windows Azure cloud driver uses the new Windows Azure IaaS API to enable users to easily deploy any application to the Windows Azure cloud.
It conforms to the normal cloud configuration files you are used to with cloudify, thus making the user experience much simpler than before.
For more info, click here.

   Cloud Driver Improvements

  • We moved quite a few cloud driver attributes to the template section: user, localdir, keyFile to make them available on a per-template basis. This allows you to configure heterogenous cloud drivers that define multiple templates with different types of operating system images. 
  • Install as a sudoer: User can now install a service/application as sudoers on a linux machine. All you need to do is to set the privileged attribute to true in their templates.

  Versioning

We did some rethinking on the arcchiteture of our documentation web site, and added support for versioning, so you can now easily read the Cloudify documentation of the version you’re using.

From now on, the documentation’s URL contains the Cloudify version.

Tamir Korem
tkorem@cloudifysource.org
Cloudify Evangelist
www.cloudifysource.org

comments

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Back to top