cloudinit.dΒΆ
This guide contains configuration information about the Cloud application coordination tool cloudinit.d.
Solving the problems in computing often requires a set of services all working together in concert. As distributed computing has evolved, the management and coordination of these services has become a complicated task. The advent of cloud computing has exacerbated this problem by providing its users with an explosion of virtual resources that need to be started, managed, monitored, and notified of each others existence and operational state.
Very little can be assumed about the network locations of these virtual machines, their IP addresses are dynamically provisioned and they can be spread across many clouds potentially all over the world. In order for the VMs to work in concert, It is critical that communication channels are established.
How can we organize, manage, and coordinate the bootstrap process of these ever growing cloud applications? Infrastructure clouds have delivered the resources but can they be leveraged in a sane and repeatable way? Once these applications are running how can we ensure that they continue to work and can we recover from failures without having to waste valuable time and potential data by completely restarting them?
To address these questions the Nimbus Project is proud to introduce cloudinit.d. cloudinit.d is a tool for launching, configuring, monitoring, and repairing a set of interdependent virtual machines in an IaaS cloud or over a set of IaaS clouds. A single launch can consist of many VMs and can span multiple IaaS providers, including offerings from commercial and academic space.