application stacks
What If You Could Provision in the Cloud Using Your Existing Data Center Tools?
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BuzzWhat if you could use your incumbent data center bare metal provisioning tools to create application instances in the cloud?
Today you may be using familiar tools in your data center to build out new application stacks successfully, such as Microsoft ADS or RIS, Kickstart or Autoyast, HP Opsware or BMC BladeLogic, or Altiris. You may have also made a significant additional investment in front-ending these provisioning tools with an in-house developed provisioning portal, or orchestrating these tools with a workflow or Runbook automation tool.
These tools and processes require a significant investment in their deployment and in the authoring and configuration knowledge that is embedded within them. But, as flexible as these tools are in reliably building configurations, they are not usable as-is with compute resources in the cloud. Consider Amazon EC2, for example. How will you get their Xen paravirt network device to PXE broadcast, or route that back to your on premise DHCP/TFTP infrastructure? Till now, the answer is that you can’t.
So, you are faced with having to use another siloed provisioning tool that is designed and built for use with your chosen cloud provider. You need to retrain staff. Reprogram configuration scripts. Maintain parallel systems that are basically doing the same thing.
It’s hard to argue that it’s worth doing all this, outside of the compelling premise that you REALLY want to be able to turn on something for 2 hours, and pay 15 or 16 cents for the use, and then turn it off. The power of that flexibility has been the motivating force behind organizations going against the grain and adopting a separate and purpose-built cloud provisioning tool to take advantage of the elasticity and flexibility of cloud-based servers.
But what if you didn’t have to make that choice? What if you could treat cloud servers EXACTLY as if they were new bare metal blade servers that had come off the loading dock, been racked and stacked, powered on, and started PXE broadcasting? Today, you can import a list of MAC addresses off your asset sheets for these newly powered-on servers into your incumbent bare metal provisioning tool of choice, and start throwing your J2EE stacks onto these servers.
CloudSwitch is committed to the proposition that you can have your cake and eat it too. You can create as many blank servers as you want, using any combination of instances sizes to customize the cores, memory, storage, network, and compute capacity that you need to provision an application stack. The blank servers can be interrogated for generated MACs. You can plug those into your bare metal provisioning systems, just like the good old days when you could go over and see the lights flash for your new server in its rack, and get ILO console access.
Turn them on, let them PXE boot, and let them provision your stack. Use them as long as you need them and throw it away. You won’t have to retire the equipment or plan a server upgrade. Your cloud provider will take care of that for you. You won’t have to change a thing. Everything you have in place will still work. Transparently.
Isn’t that just a basically better idea?
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