rPath Ships Cloud ‘Appliance’ To Simplify OpenStack Private Clouds 
rPath, provider of an automated platform to manage software across physical, virtual and cloud environments, is shipping an OpenStack Compute Appliance to simplify the building and maintaining of private clouds. The appliance is a set of ready-to-run, pre-configured components that will deliver push-button installation for rPath’s open source OpenStack cloud platform.
rPath, provider of an automated platform to manage software across physical, virtual and cloud environments, is shipping an OpenStack Compute Appliance to simplify the building and maintaining of on-premise private clouds.
rPath’s latest “appliance” differs in major ways from what devs and operations manager might think of as a hardware/firmware cloud appliance.
The OpenStack Compute Appliance is actually a set of ready-to-run, pre-configured components that will deliver push-button installation for rPath’s open source OpenStack cloud platform. rPath’s OpenStack is a full assembly of open-source components that allow devs building private cloud solutions to avoid hand-assembly of multiple interdependent components, Shawn Edmondson, rPath’s Vice President Product Strategy, told IDN.
rPath’s appliance approach provides OpenStack developers “an accelerated, validated build process for testing and releasing changes to the compute node stack,” he said. With OpenStack, deployers can simply download and launch a pre-validated compute node image, and use simple rPath tools to keep deployed nodes up to date with the latest OpenStack changes, Edmondson added.
Download the rPath OpenStack Compute Appliance here
The OpenStack appliance can address multi-tier applications with full OS and middleware stacks, allowing users to automatically deploy, configure and update to the OpenStack cloud platform on both physical and virtual infrastructures, he added.
“Up until this point, there has really never been any type of easily-consumable, up-to-date ‘OpenStack appliance’ that users can simply ‘grab and go’,” Brett Adam, CTO and SVP of Engineering at rPath said. “We are well on our way to building a continuous integration solution for OpenStack, and are looking forward to hearing feedback from the open source community regarding what additional improvements we can be making to simplify their lives a bit more.”
Under the Covers of rPath’s OpenStack ‘Appliance’ Model
rPath’s release of the pre-configured OpenStack Compute Appliance follows comments from adopters, asking for ways to simplify the process.
"The OpenStack Compute Appliance provides an accelerated, validated build process for testing and releasing changes to the compute node stack. "
Shawn Edmondson
VP, Product Strategy
Distinguished Engineer
rPath
A post at rPath’s blog notes:
[B]uilding and deploying OpenStack compute servers has also been something of a challenge for the OpenStack dev team – yet exactly this is needed for continuous test purposes. The goal, naturally, is to have every committed change to the OpenStack sources result in an automated build…of all the requisite pieces (ideally against multiple host OS choices) and then the automated deployment and configuration to both bare metal and virtual infrastructure so that automated tests can then be run.
rPath engineers took the bit in their teeth and undertook to build a more easy-to-work-with form factor for OpenStack. The blog continued:
Here at rPath, we’re all about automated build, deployment and configuration of complex, multi-tier applications that include full OS and middleware stacks. (sometimes known as “appliances”). So it sounded like we had some tech and skills that could help.
The OpenStack Compute Appliance was born.
“rPath builds versioned, detailed appliance models, then uses those models to not only generate images for rapid, repeatable deployment, but also drive incremental, pre-validated system updates,” Edmondson told IDN. “That capability is particularly valuable for complex, rapidly-changing applications – such as the OpenStack compute node.” As part of this initiative, rPath will be donating staff time and company technology for a test cloud based on equipment from Rackspace, he added.
This architecture approach to an appliance model for private clouds allows devs and deployment teams a lot of flexibility, Edmondson added. “The rPath appliance model is completely retargetable,” he said. “That is, after defining the model, you can ask rPath to dynamically generate physical, virtual, and cloud images for a variety of deployment targets. So if you switch from virtual OpenStack compute nodes for testing to physical OpenStack compute nodes for high-performance deployment, the same rPath model works identically.”
The open source rPath software running within the OpenStack compute node provides a flexible command-line interface for upgrades, he added. The commercial rPath X6 provides a GUI console to control provisioning and updates across an entire datacenter. That said, rPath X6 is not required to use the OpenStack Compute Appliance.
The OpenStack Compute Appliance is for any enterprise, MSP, or open-source contributor that needs to deploy, test, or build OpenStack clouds.
As to how many OpenStack Compute Appliances a dev/deployment team would need, Edmondson said this: “Each instance of the appliance is an OpenStack compute node. Depending on the scale of the OpenStack cloud you are deploying, you could have anywhere from one to thousands of instances.”
Both OpenStack and the rPath-built OpenStack Compute Appliance are fully open source, and can be downloaded free of charge.
rPath donated rPath X6 commercial software to the OpenStack development team to support its effort to rapidly build and release new versions of OpenStack. The technology is available in either ISO or VMware format, Edmondson said.
