Cloud woes? CFEngine made its Orion Cloud Pack available last week, as a 1-2-3 quick-start for users of its CFEngine 3.0.x family of products. Continuing the astronomical theme of the company, the page sports the slogan “Get the cloud under Orion’s belt” – a reference to the M42 Nebula in which is located, where else, just under the famous three stars of Orion’s belt.
3-2-1 Launch!
“The Cloud Pack is a jump-start kit for the cloud,” explains CEO Thomas
Ryd. “The idea is to make it completely trivial to get started with
managed services. CFEngine is unique in not only making installation
easy, but also in bringing hands-free repair to the problem. It’s
especially important to have self-healing technology when your computer
might be half-way across the world.”
“Our interest in the cloud comes as part of a larger strategy of supporting virtualization and outsourcing in a variety of ways of using CFEngine’s approach to management. Businesses are looking for answers to questions about how whether they should insource or outsource IT departments today. CFEngine levels the playing field by making the location of the machines irrelevant. If you want to run a `private cloud’ or a desktop PC that is no problem.”
CFEngine author and founder Mark Burgess (Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College) has been publicly critical of cloud computing, saying that the cloud is not a new technology. Has he now changed his mind? “The cloud is first and foremost an economic phenomenon,” Burgess remarks, “not a technological one. What companies like Amazon have done nicely is to add the elasticity of the scaling, but it’s all made by integrating established technology. The Cloud Pack makes this clear – we put it together in response to the current excitement about the cloud, but it works equally well on your home PC.”
Industry partnerships
CFEngine has chosen to partner with Canonical and its Ubuntu operating system, as well as with Eucalyptus and its private cloud framework – both companies, who are supporting cloud services by making different aspects of the puzzle easy. Ryd explains, “Ubuntu is rapidly becoming the operating system of choice in the cloud today thanks to its user friendliness, and Eucalyptus is an enabling interface for running Amazon compatible services in a private environment, addressing the potential security fears that the public cloud services have sparked.”
Both companies were eager to collaborate with CFEngine to bring strong configuration management capabilities to the challenges of deploying massive systems.
What’s next?
You can expect more versions of the Orion Cloud Pack, targeting different cloud providers: Amazon EC2, Eucalytus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Rackspace, and more.
