EC2 cloud management front ends
There is a wealth of resources available now through Amazon Web Services. One of which is the EC2 compute cloud. But EC2 is really just a bunch of virtual machines with finite resources. To enable these to act as a render farm, performing asyncronous jobs, there needs to be some kind of management front end. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
Scalr has nice process documents, a screencast and come flow charts. Main problem is it’s written in object oriented PHP. Suprisingly, this decision didn’t influence the developers enough to use some kind of ORM, and I’m seeing SQL in functions as high level as RunInstance. I’m going to write off Scalr for now. I wish them the best.
On the level of further abstraction, Morph is a company who’s attempting to completely abstract Ruby on Rails and offer a set of management interfaces for a complete production deployment scenario. Unfortunately this makes details like dependency management and base OS choice impossible, as well as making version conflict resolution complicated within a community (Ruby on Rails) that is currently not well coordinated, to put it nicely.
So…survey says…NOTHING. I’m off to generate some Rails scaffolding. Of course it will be open source. I’m actually sort of excited.
Tags: cloud, ec2, ruby on rails