I just finished a great call with Joseph Weitekamp
What is Cloudify:
Cloudify is a software runtime lifecycle management system for cloud-hosted services.
- It manages in an automated fashion:
- The provisioning of cloud infrastructure
- The installation and configuration of services on that infrastructure
- Monitors those services for health and parameters. Respond to SLA violations.
- The uninstallation of service software and deprovisioning of cloud infrastructure
- Provide customized ways to interact with the running system that hide its cloudy deployment.
Summary
- Cloud-provider agnostic through abstraction layer. Public or private, ie, Amazon, Rackspace…
- Recipe-based definition of deployments: end-state and means for achieving it
- Recipes are parameters + app lifecycle event handlers written in Groovy, a Python-like JVM-hosted language.
- Recipes for complex suites of services can be declared, which manages the coordinated configuration of these services.
- Service interdependencies declarable and respected. Services don’t start until those they depend one are up.
- Recipe parameterization and inheritance (generalization / specialization) allow re-use and standardization
- Custom Commands can be defined in Groovy and run interactively in a shell or web browser
- Probes can be defined to surface telemetry on the services. Standard probes for standard telemetry are provided. Custom probe can be coded in Groovy or Java
- Web Service Dashboard (meters and time-series graphs) can be declared to monitor service health/performance
- Automated SLA Assurance can be declared to assure required number of service instances are always running. Additional service instances are provisioned, installed and started as necessary
- Auto-scaling based on telemetry can similar drive the provisioning, installation and startup / shutdown of service instances.
