A brief note on services

As mentioned earlier, a cloud is an umbrella that groups various services together. To successfully deploy an application to a cloud, it is necessary to have a few services. Without these services, your OneOps will not be able to deploy your application, or your application will not function properly. Before we see how to add services, let's have a brief look at the type of services you need to add to a cloud.

Compute

Compute is the primary service that you will add to the cloud, on top of which an application will be deployed. In terms of most clouds, this will translate to the virtual machines of various sizes that are available, to which your application will be deployed. Compute capacity can be provided by Azure, Amazon AWS, Rackspace, OpenStack, Docker, and Vagrant. OpenStack, Docker, and Vagrant can be your own local clouds.

Note

At the time of writing, Docker and Vagrant are not supported as compute options, but will be supported soon, in a future release.

DNS

A DNS service is needed for your application to be identified globally and in an easy manner. We will take a look at the application naming convention at the time of application deployment, however, OneOps does not like to rely on the name provided by the cloud provider for various reasons. Firstly, the vm deployed underneath your application may need to be replaced at anytime, in which case, it is easy to do so if it has a DNS record pointing to it. Secondly, if the application is deployed in a load-balanced way, then a DNS must be used, which OneOps will configure to the load-balancer. Thirdly, if you deploy a redundant setup on two or more different clouds, then it makes it is easier for OneOps to switch to the backup application if the primary goes down if you have the DNS setup. Hence, adding DNS service to your cloud is mandatory.

Note

DNS is not the same as your normal DNS service, but what is normally referred to as a Cloud DNS service provided by Amazon Route 53, Rackspace DNS. If you have a domain name, these services let you manage that domain via an API.

Global DNS

Global DNS (GDNS), acts as a traffic router on a global level. It routes traffic based on your DNS records on a global level. If you have deployments in multiple zones or multiple data centers, then GDNS can make your apps more responsive by routing traffic to the nearest zone for your clients. Currently, OneOps supports Azure, Azure Traffic Manager, AWS Route 53, and Rackspace GDNS.

Load balancer

Load balancers are used to make applications fault-tolerant across multiple instances and availability zones. Load balancers are also used to remove unhealthy VMs from application pools. Currently, OneOps supports Azure, AWS (ELB), OpenStack (Neutron), and Rackspace load balancers.

Storage

Storage is external block storage that can be attached to individual VMs. The only service currently supported is Amazon's EBS and Azure's data disk. Since block storage consists of vendor specific storage devices, they can only be attached if the compute instances are spun on that vendor's cloud services; that is, you can attach Azure data disk to your instances only if your compute instances are on Azure.

File store

The only file store currently supported is Amazon Simple Storage System (Amazon S3), which is a highly available object store good for storing files, images, and logs.