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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