Talk of the coming Cloud may be hanging on our horizon, but tonight, at Hr23.Day21.December::, planet Earth reaches the Winter Solstice, when its axial tilt reaches its farthest point from the Sun and darkest night of the year for us in Oslo. As part of our celebration of the holidays around the solstice, we would like to lay a small package under the tree for all our community users, to brighten the sky with a taste of our Nova templates for Linux Managed Services.
The Orion Cloud
CFEngine’s Orion Cloud Pack was originally conceived to make the use of the EC2 Cloud simple for users of CFEngine (see the demo), but the techniques that make Cloud Computing simple are not at all limited to that. With powerful configuration management, it really doesn’t matter where you do your computing.
Today, we are partnering with private cloud technologists Open Nebula, and Canonical of Ubuntu fame, to make this vision a reality using the most lightweight and forward-looking technology available today.
Like Orion’s belt itself, that illuminates the Orion Nebula, we envisioned these templates as 3 steps across the heavens to light up systems with a menu of the most popular managed services. We give this to the community now to lead the way in developing CFEngine solutions further. This can be a first step towards developing a full library of contributions for and by the CFEngine Community. Users of our commercial products will benefit directly from this openness, and will have the enhanced experience provided by the reporting and the Copernicus Knowledge Map.
The CFEngine Cloud Pack is not about managing any particular cloud, but about making it easy to rebuild and relocate services anywhere, with a simple repeatable process that incorporates CFEngine’s automatic self-healing.
Get the software
CFEngine templates on the source code downloads page.
What lies in a name…?
In case you haven’t noticed, we use astronomical names at CFEngine for all our innovations.
Orion, the hunter from Greek mythology, was taken by renaissance mythologist Natalis Comes to be an allegory for an approaching storm cloud. Better-known today, Orion is the name of one of the most famous and studied astronomical constellations in the night sky. It contains the three bright stars of Orion’s belt (the three steps to the cloud) and the Orion M42 Nebula (a gigantic dust cloud) beneath its belt. Now with the CFEngine Orion Cloud Pack, you too can get the Cloud under your belt! ;-)
The Orion Nebula is, in fact, part of a much larger cloud or nebula in the constellation of Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. We chose the name Orion for our Cloud Pack (apart from the obvious puns) because we believe that Cloud Computing is only a stepping stone towards what we term Molecular Computing, in which many independent platforms and services bond together to form network patterns. These patterned systems act like molecules with new properties, bonded together by promises. This view follows naturally from a description of computing using Promise Theory, replacing traditional monolithic and hierarchical systems with a more natural form of engineering.
