[in the news] Spotlight Feature: Building Appliances for the Cloud with Fedora 15

[Kara Schiltz]

Red Hat News Blog
5.19.11
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/blog/spotlight-feature-building-applianc...

Spotlight Feature: Building Appliances for the Cloud with Fedora 15
By Fedora Team

Fedora 15 is just around the corner, and as with previous Fedora 
releases, we'll be taking a closer look at some of the new features as 
we approach Fedora 15's release day. First up: BoxGrinder 
<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BoxGrinder>;. BoxGrinder comes to 
Fedora from our friends in the JBoss Community <http://www.jboss.org/>;, 
and we're thrilled to be working with them!

BoxGrinder is a set of tools for making appliances, typically used in 
virtualized environments, or for use in a cloud environment. In a 
nutshell, it "grinds" out a preconfigured disk image, including the 
operating system and required software, ready for deployment - and can 
even deliver the appliance to a targeted location.

There are a few "subprojects" which make up BoxGrinder. BoxGrinder Build 
is a command-line tool, which is responsible for actually building the 
appliances. BoxGrinder REST is a server with a farm of builder nodes -- 
when building the appliance, build tasks are distributed to nodes where 
BoxGrinder Build is used to build the appliance. The resulting appliance 
is then transferred to a configured destination. And if command-line 
isn't your cup of tea, BoxGrinder Studio provides a web front-end to 
BoxGrinder Rest to facilitate a user-friendly, graphical user interface 
experience.

One of the best features of BoxGrinder is its flexibility in appliance 
locations, operating system support, and virtualization platforms. 
Created appliances can be sent to a variety of location types, such as a 
remote SFTP server or Amazon EC2. It currently supports Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and CentOS, and multitude of platforms 
including KVM/Xen, VMWare, VirtualBox, and EC2. A number of public cloud 
providers are supported as well, and the list is rapidly growing 
<http://boxgrinder.org/cloud-locations/>;.

The simple appliance definition concept is great for sysadmins, 
particularly for those interested in repeatable deployments. "...having 
a simple appliance definition makes it possible to build the appliance 
in a repeatable fashion later. Or you can just rebuild the appliance for 
a different platform or deliver it to a different location. It's up to 
you how you want to use BoxGrinder's features," says Marek Goldmann, the 
BoxGrinder project leader and senior software engineer at Red Hat. 
"BoxGrinder helps you create the appliances with the software you want 
and configure it in the way you want. BoxGrinder saves you time. You 
don't need to install the operating system and configure all of your 
stuff afterward manually - BoxGrinder does this for you."

True to its open-source roots, BoxGrinder has a growing community, with 
responsive maintainers always looking to lend a hand. It was designed 
with a plugin architecture, so adding features like a new operating 
system, platform, or delivery method is easy to do -- and your tips can 
be shared right back with the community. The BoxGrinder community page 
<http://boxgrinder.org/community/> has all of the information to get you 
started with engaging the community.

Want to read more? Check out the Fedora team's interview with Marek 
Goldmann about BoxGrinder here 
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BoxGrinder_in_F15>;. You can also hop 
over to the BoxGrinder webpage <http://boxgrinder.org/> to take a look 
at the project's latest news, and get more details on usage.

Try out BoxGrinder now! Download the Fedora 15 Beta here 
<http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease?anF15b>;, and keep an eye out 
for the release of Fedora 15 in just a few days.

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