We are happy to announce the release 0.3.4 of our DICE Deployment Service and version 0.7.0 of the DICE TOSCA technology library. With these components, we aim to remove one big hurdle on the path to the world of Big Data: setting the components up and wiring them to have all the parts play along nicely. We also want to enable the users to easily run their application in a number of private and public clouds without any worry of being locked into a particular one. This release introduces a unified approach to deploying blueprints to OpenStack, Amazon EC2 or Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator without needing to change anything in the blueprint.
The DICE Deployment Service runs as a dedicated service. It is our front-end to the Cloudify Manager also running in the same network. The DICE Deployment Service forwards any TOSCA blueprint it receives to the Cloudify Manager back-end. Any blueprint compatible with Cloudify will therefore work from DICE Deployment Service.
The DICE TOSCA technology library is a plug-in that works at the level of each individual blueprint. To use this version of the library, put the following lines to the heading sections of the blueprint YAML:
tosca_definitions_version: cloudify_dsl_1_3
imports:
- https://github.com/dice-project/DICE-Deployment-Cloudify/releases/download/0.7.0/full.yamlIn the previous versions of the plug-in, the choice of the imports URL globally defined for the whole blueprint what type of platform the blueprint would be deployed into. Now, this information is a part of the platform inputs used internally by the plug-in. In a recommended set-up, the values should be set at the DICE Deployment Service (e.g., by using the set-inputs CLI command). In that way, the blueprints can be free of any platform-specific configurations, making them fully portable across platforms. Note that the same blueprints will work directly with Cloudify without the DICE Deployment Service, but in this case the user has to provide all the platform related inputs.
In terms of the service set-up, we now enforce setting up HTTPS services, i.e., encryption of communications between clients and both the Cloudify Manager and the DICE Deployment Service. This makes the services set-up slightly less convenient, because the administrators now need to manage a Certificate Authority (CA). However, the benefits in terms of security of the service are well worth the cost.
This software is open source, thus anyone is free to obtain and experiment with it. We have prepared a number of example blueprints that work as they are, and can also be easily modified and combined into new arbitrarily complex clusters.
Useful links:
- DICE Deployment Service
- Installing Cloudify Manager
- Installing and configuring DICE deployment service
- Blueprint examples
Matej Artač (XLAB), Tadej Borovšak (XLAB)
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