Elastic Server On-Demand - I have one virtual server, two applications and a beer, please!

Our audience is professional enough for me from the very beginning of the material to convince you of the benefits and usefulness of virtualization. This is now the number one trend (well, or at least one of the main ones) in the IT world and this is not just a tribute to fashion, but a real and reasonable market demand. Now remember the last time you deployed a virtualized infrastructure. For example, my experience in this is quite large (albeit one-sided) - I just sometimes like to test various operating systems and specific application configurations, so I often have to deploy one or more virtual servers. Here is one of the last ones - I really wanted to install JeOS, a special Ubuntu distribution that focuses on virtual environments, but he didn’t even want to run after installation. And how many cases were there when there were difficulties with installing certain programs, updates, incompatibility of configurations - this is generally a separate conversation. But it turned out that there are solutions for this. Simple and original - web service in the style of web 2.0 (yes, that's right) for creating and distributing virtual servers and their images. And so, consider the Elastic Server On-Demand from Cohesive FT .


Cohesive FT provides two services - a community that is completely free, but has a number of limitations for the usual work of little importance, and a personal one, which costs 10 USD per month and has advanced features. We will consider while the community version of the service. And so, after registering, a kind of virtual store is available to us, where we go through the catalog and select the software we need, simply by adding it to the basket. For example - you see in the directory different versions of the Apache HTTP server, the MySQL database server - and if you need a LAMP stack, you simply add these applications to your basket. Then you decide to look at more exotic things, well, for example, just to experiment with new technologies. And choose the Ruby section in the tag cloud. To choose, you will be offered the most popular package Apache + Passenger (mod_rails), or a bunch of Lighttpd + FastCGI, or a bundle with Monreal Cluster. As you can see, there are several options for almost all environments, and we can combine both the web server and the application environments themselves. If you need additional components for Ruby, choose the Rubygems section and add everything you like.

Exactly the same picture for other environments, for example, Java - both the Apache technology stack and third-party applications, such as the Jetty server, are available to you. And a few more hundreds of packages and applications - search is available, and the directory, and the built-in rating system, user reviews, tags, in general - all the attributes of modern Web 2.0 sites.
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After you have drawn up a set of applications (by the way, in my opinion, you don’t even care about compatibility), go to the most interesting. From this set, the service will start creating a virtual machine image for you. First, you will be prompted to choose a name for the set and specify the version — it is likely that you will be experimenting with the configuration, so you can determine whether the test or an already working configuration. After that, your software suite will be saved as a template, and in the future you will be able to immediately build new servers based on it, other users will also be able to access your package and use it. However, like you, it is not always necessary to build your server individually from packages, you can search for the closest set of software from among those already collected by other users and use it as a template of your own.

Now you can proceed to the build phase of your server. Specific options are already available here. You must select a base platform - that is, the environment in which your server will be deployed. Available - VMware (the company is their partner), Parallels and Xen, PXE images in development. If you have an account in Amazon EC2, then the server you create can be immediately deployed on this platform by selecting the appropriate package of services. The rest of the images will be simply available for download and you can use them on your computer.



Then you can specify the amount of RAM, from 128MB to 2GB, OS for the server, while only one access is available, DaiSY Linux, however, the developers promise one of the Ubuntu releases. A network may be available to the system — via NAT, only a host machine or a bridge (all, as in conventional systems like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox). The size of the virtual disk varies from 768 MB to 16 GB, but the disk itself is dynamic, so do not worry, the image will take up as much space as the installed programs and the system will take, besides this the image will be archived to reduce traffic - some images can be downloaded perceptibly long, especially on slow channels.

It remains to specify the name and description of the future server and click the "Build now" button. Yes, two more options are to use the default login, “ctfuser”, so that the image can be used immediately after the download and you do not need to read specific documentation from the author each time, and note whether your build will be available to other users. Now create a server. At this point, I recommend that you step back and chat with colleagues, drink coffee - on a powerful server platform of the service, creating a typical image takes about 10 minutes, and the whole process is shown to you right in the browser, each stage with a brief description. After creating an image, it is available for download on your personal page, and is also available in the repository to all users, if you, of course, noted this when creating the server.



And what if the desired software is not listed? Of course, you can simply make an image, then deploy it and deliver the necessary applications, but this is, so to speak, “not our way”. Especially if you plan to create many images or just want to share with the community a new configuration. As well as images, you can replenish the repository with your own software - several formats are available, in particular, JAR / JAW and Ruby on Rails packages, as well as a universal version - Filesystem tree archive, which can be used to deploy any application, observing certain standards (for ports, etc.).

As for the company's business model, it is based on the provision of various services and extended accounts. They are also the most active authors of packages and pre-configured servers. A personal account costs $ 10 / month, and allows you to store a larger number of virtual machines (in the usual only 5), use more powerful data plans for deploying on Amazon EC2, share your account with several people and maintain your own software repository. Since virtualization is the main current trend in the market, however, it is still quite difficult for an ordinary user and even an IT specialist, such a service, which takes on all the rough work and care, greatly simplifies not only life, but also the very perception of technology. After all, everything is simple even for an inexperienced user - he went into the store, chose software, pressed a couple of buttons, entered a name and voila, there is a system!

By the way, Cohesive FT is a typical startup - all venture funds are among investors, and at the very early stage they received investments from an angel, so not everything is so bad, just think up a service that solves a pressing problem in the area that is expanding on a horse. which the market is focused on - and you will have money, an interesting job, a profit, and an audience. Here at Cohesive FT it turned out - the service is convenient enough to use (although there are some not obvious features in the interface), and it solves, and qualitatively solves, the real problem.

From what I really want and expect - other virtual machine formats (for example, I would really like the images for the Sun xVM Virtual Box), several, to choose from, operating systems, ideally, Win32, but here, of course, license complexity, and also the expansion of third-party services Cloud-hosting, which could deploy the system created in one click.