Chef and Puppet have established themselves as the way to manage both cloud based and local servers via recipes.
To fully manage a cloud or non-cloud data center you need an orchestration layer to manage all the resources. In the next few years we will see what products becomes the established orchestration provider(s).
First lets look at the recent history to see what happened over last 7 short years:
2006
1. Amazon launch Amazon Web Services an Infrastructure as a Service cloud where each service is controlled via accessed over HTTP, using REST and SOAP protocols and is billed based on usage.
2. Rightscale launch a cloud management platform later that year based on there proprietary server scripts.
2007
Heroku launch their Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) initially supporting Ruby. This saved alot of the
configuration required for IaaS at the expensive of a lack of configurability. However
Heroku and other “first-generation” PaaS systems force the developer to adhere to specific architecture and consume PaaS-specific classes in the application itself.
2009
1. Opscode launch the Chef configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang.
(Puppet, the other major open source configuration management tool was founded in 2005)
2. Rightscale add chef support later in the year
2010
Vagrant created as a open source tool for building complete development environments. This support many environments including chef so the same production setup recipes can be used. There are also tools to help build servers like veewee
2011
1. Amazon release Cloud Formation
that allows resources to be declared in JSON format and run but it did not really help with configuring the
servers.
2. Amazon release Elastic Beanstalk as an easier way to quickly deploy and manage applications.
3. Cloud Foundry released. The first open source cloud computing Platform as a service (PaaS). This was much more configurable
than first generation PaaS like Heroku and you can create your own custom service.
2012
OpenStack Heat started as orchestration platform that supports Cloud Formation.
2013
1. Amazon release OpsWorks a DevOps solution for managing applications with embedded chef scripts.
2. Rackspace announce an open source product OpenCenter also based on Chef.
3. Lots of third parties offering cloud management but surely most of these will be bought up by large vendors or disappear so are high risk:
Stackify
Cloud Munch
Cloud Weaver
AppFirst
Inedo
Cloupia
The Future
Currently both AppsWorks and Rightscale are proprietary technologies that leverage chef recipes.
What Orchestration layer(s) will establish themselves in the next few years?
Ideally it should be open source, freely available and work on multiple cloud and non-cloud architectures.
-Perhaps Cloud Foundry will allow chef recipes to build the Apps and Services.
-Opscode could to add an open source orchestration layer to Chef maybe based on top of the Fog ruby cloud services library.
References
Chef: Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Cookbooks, Environments, Roles
Devops Productivity Report 2013
Is your PaaS composable or contextual?
Expanding the Cloud - Introducing AWS OpsWorks, a Powerful Application Management Solution
DevOps, PaaS and Everything in Between
RightScale - Thoughts on AWS OpsWorks application management
