In order to provide a more “rounded” voice on the GoGrid blog, we are going to start having some new authors. To kick off this initiative, I wanted to introduce Paul Lappas, GoGrid’s VP of Engineering and Co-Founder. Paul manages GoGrid’s engineering efforts, technical operations, IT and the technology vision for GoGrid.

Recently, he and some other team members attending a MeetUp in San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters to discuss and present  JClouds and Pallet and how those tools are being used at GoGrid. Here is Paul’s synopsis of Jclouds and the presentation:

“GoGrid is doing some really cool stuff using an automated provisioning technology called “Pallet”.  Pallet is similar to existing automating configuration technologies like Puppet and Chef but with a key difference that it was built specifically to solve the problem of quickly spinning up and configuring groups of servers in the cloud. It support “Jclouds” out of the box and is implemented as a set of libraries for “Clojure” which is a LISP-based programming language that is quickly building steam.  Jclouds is an open source framework developed by Adrian Cole that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java development skills, with an API that allows you the freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features.

GoGrid is working with the author of Pallet (Hugo Duncan) and a key contributor Toni Batchelli to enable the fast deployment of fully functional GoGrid environments for use by development teams for test & dev. It’s a tough problem for most companies, but especially challenging for us considering how complex (and capital intensive) it is to stage an end-to-end GoGrid environment due to the sheer breadth of technologies that span almost all 7 layers of the OSI stack. With Pallet, we are able to treat our “infrastructure as code” and manage the configuration of systems, networks and applications just like we do our source code so that they can be quickly applied to spin-up new environments. But perhaps the coolest aspect is that we are using GoGrid internally to virtualize the individual components! It’s kind of like Inception where there is a grid-within-a-grid. Our teams are still getting their heads around logging into a GoGrid account and seeing virtual representation of physical GoGrid components represented as VM icons in the GUI! Very cool stuff.

The following presentation provides more details of the implementation and was presented at the recent Jclouds meetup at Twitter’s headquarter in San Francisco. Check out future jclouds meetups here:
http://www.meetup.com/jclouds/”

Below is the presentation that was presented at the Jclouds meetup: (more…) «Agile Development at GoGrid with Pallet and Jclouds (Presentation)»