CloudScript
CloudScript
CloudScript Overview
NephoScale's CloudScript is a build language for the cloud that acts as a catalyst or enabler in the areas for automation, continuous delivery, and DevOps. It brings advanced agile development techniques and application lifecycle management to cloud infrastructure in a powerful way. Simply put, NephoScale's CloudScript orchestration tools enable users to continuously optimize their cloud infrastructure to more efficiently deliver their applications to users than ever before. NephoScale’s CloudScript allows all cloud resources, images, scripts, recipes, and embedded code to be managed within a single text file or template. Because it supports idempotentcy it reduces the number of needed configuration templates to always only one, vastly simplifying the planning, provisioning, and ongoing management of cloud resources.
Determining how to optimize an application’s delivery at every stage of its evolution remains a time-consuming problem. With CloudScript, Nephoscale’s cloud infrastructure platform is redefining the way applications are developed and delivered. CloudScript is a domain specific language that is designed to address the application lifecycle management challenges today's organizations face. Now with CloudScript orchestration technology, users can easily optimize an application’s delivery performance in a continuous and iterative cycle at every stage of its development evolution in a more error free and predictable way.
With the availability of APIs managing cloud infrastructure can now be viewed as a software development activity, and now with CloudScript the concept of "Treating Infrastructure as Code" is taken to a new more advanced level. The most important aspect of the CloudScript technology is its ability to empower users to manage all cloud compute and storage resources, applications stacks, code, and their associated dependencies in an easy-to-use and centralized fashion.
Due to the hyper competitive landscape of the new globalized economy the adoption of DevOps is now becoming an organizational requirement designed to increase feature development flow and improve the stability and reliability of infrastructure, and IT departments, software developers, and business managers are dealing with this new reality. The answer to increasing efficiency, and the adoption of DevOps, within organizations is the NephoScale NephOS IaaS cloud services platform, with CloudScript, which offers new unique and powerful cloud management capabilities such as support for:
- Integrated development environment (IDE) for creating, loading, debugging, and editing CloudScript templates
- Idempotent operations so users can repeat or retry a configuration changes as often as they want without any undesired consequences
- Organizational collaboration features, such as CloudScript Interpreter, which makes CloudScript text files easily readable by both technical and non-technical users
- Embedded code in its native form without required alterations or changes
NephoScale's goal is to establish DevOps as the status quo within organizations by creating a cloud services platform that successfully brings software developers and IT operations staff together in a way that enables them to make dramatic improvements in organizational effectiveness. CloudScript accelerates the adoption of DevOps within organizations by setting a new standard in infrastructure management for speed, predictability, ease-of-use, collaboration, automation, and governance.
Configuration management is a set of advanced capabilities that work across the entire NephOS platform to significantly boost the ease of IaaS automation and programmability. It is conveniently supported by all three platform access methods including: CloudScript, the RESTful API, and the Customer Web Portal.
Popular configuration management features include:
- Automation of user configurations, application installation, and many system administration tasks
- Ability to run “init scripts” at boot time, enabling users to automate their infrastructure more easily by eliminating the need to manually initiate a script or series of scripts after a server is provisioned
- Headless installation of Chef/Puppet from within a CloudScript, and subsequent processing of Chef/Puppet recipe(s) automatically after a server is provisioned
- Configuration modification on running systems to trigger additional processes that need execution
- View of post execution output and results of scripts from within the customer portal
CloudScript Templates
CloudScript Templates are prepackaged combined configurations that include both infrastructure builds and application stacks, which are utilized for rapid single-click provisioning of cloud environments.
- All NephoScale customers can leverage the single-click templates in the NephoScale CloudScript Template Library
- Experts such as NephoScale engineers, members of the developer community, and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) develop and optimize CloudScript Templates
- The community extends the functionality and further develops the capabilities of the NephOS cloud services platform
- The benefit of templates created by users with domain expertise is that they understand all the systems configurations for specific environments so the templates will work the first time and every time
- The NephoScale prepackaged templates represent a collection of resources, corresponding application stacks, and associated scripts/recipes
- Start with a single server stack and run a template as-is, or start with a multi-server stack and make modifications to the template to facilitate the expanded infrastructure environment
- Easily modify a template after it has been deployed so the stacks it contains can be applied to any reference architecture
- Create any sized environment from small a single server to a complex multi server environment, including a fully load balanced LAMP stack with complimentary ObjectStor object-based cloud storage
- Deploy any template across any reference architecture. If infrastructure requirements grow over time, add additional servers to scale the infrastructure using templates provided free of charge by NephoScale
Customer Web Portal
NephoScale’s portal provides a single pane view of all of the elements needed for managing all NephoScale cloud resources, including:
- Cloudlet virtual servers
- BareMetal dedicated servers
- ObjectStor cloud storage
- Account information
- Invoices
- User access
In the orchestration section there is an integrated development environment (IDE) that is used for creating, loading, debugging, and editing CloudScript templates. Using the CloudScript editor languages or code such as Bash, Perl, Python, and PHP can be embedded into CloudScript templates for use on servers. From within the Job Manager all orchestration jobs can be viewed, including all planned, in-flight, and completed jobs. The customer portal also provides a 24x7 support function for users to open and view technical support tickets and notifications.
RESTful API
The API is used for programmatically manipulating cloud infrastructure over HTTP, and is the most granular level of control over the NephOS cloud platform. Its most typical use is for provisioning and managing servers and storage. Users who want to create their own job management client can use the API to call into NephOS platform, and the API can be used to automate provisioning and manipulation of infrastructure directly from user applications. Resellers can use the API for real time status and monitoring requirements for billing and account information, and can use it as a throttling mechanism to monitor usage and expenses and then take action as necessary.
The NephoScale Admin CLI provides an additional convenient way to access the NephoScale API.
- It requires that an agent be installed on every server
- The agent can be added to a server using either CloudScript or the REST API
- Once a server is created with an agent it can be accessed using the CLI
- By running some simple configuration commands using the REST API users can run the commands in a shell
- Shell can be used as a mechanism to easily run recipes
- Users can leverage tokens to allow commands to be run on servers over time in a stateful manner
- Use the VNC Console to connect into a server to use the CLI as an easy way to get information out of the NephOS platform