Cloud Computing with Debian and its descendants
This page summarises on what to expect from Debian when it comes to compute clouds. Please refer to Wikipedia or other sources for details about what clouds are about. The idea is that you get virtual instances of some self-assembled or off-shelf booting disk image. You start them, pay for their lifetime (likely), pay for the data that goes in or out, and stop them again.
Our fine distribution can play any role in here. It can
- run as a cloud OS
- run the infrastructure that runs the clouds
- run as the joe the plumber's regular desktop OS that contacts the cloud infrastructure with requests to control the clouds
Where to get more information
Eucalyptus - a free cloud infrastructure with Debian packages pending
euca2ools - free clone of Amazon ec2 console tools
?Cloud/CreateImage - instruction on how to prepare a cloud-ready image
Cloud/TorqueCluster - instruction how to setup a torque cluster within a Eucalyptus cloud
?Cloud/Integration - changes or additions to Debian to prepare and run images using only packaged material.
OpenNebula - toolkit for IaaS cloud handling (with mixed private and public nodes)
opennebula - Debian package for OpenNebula toolkit
Amazon - the EC2 that got the craze going
Cloud/AmazonEC2Image - Registered Amazon Machine Image
- The Net At Large - various howtos that linking Debian with clouds
LinuxConfig.org - how to prepare an image for Amazon's EC2
Who in the Debian community is interested in clouds and why?
Firstly, the extension from providing packages together is to use them together. Thus, the clouds, just like computational grids, may become a way to extend our current way we think about our community. The following groups were observed to show some sincere interest in the cloud technology:
- sharing of administrative burden also for data that needs to be regularly updated
- its Bioinformatics wing sees lots of parallel computing to be performed on clouds
The RightScale OSS team builds and publishes images for cloud users. For a list of available images, see Cloud/AmazonEC2Image.
See also
HighPerformanceComputing - wiki page gathering tools for distributed computing which can/should partially be combined with cloud technology
VMBuilder - tool for the creation of virtual machines for Xen, KVM, VirtualBox with the prospect to run them in a cloud
euca2ools - handling of virtual machines for the Eucalyptus and Amazon elastic compute cloud.