Today, I called together an impromptu chat on jclouds integration on irc (#jclouds on freenode). The goal was to have contributors and stakeholders discuss what they’re working on, and generally get in touch with eachother. We were fairly well represented, 10 in the room by the end of it coming in from all over US, norway, romania, and new zealand. Outside geography, we were very diverse, with folks from jclouds, terracotta, jboss, rackspace, rimuhosting, enStratus/Dasein, and vCloud online. I’ll sum up the topics we covered, for those of you who missed. Here it goes!

ShrinkWrap
Presented by aslak

ShrinkWrap is an open source, general purpose Archive API with a fluent’ish sound to it. It has a Extension model that lets you write specific Archive types like JavaArchive, WebArchive, etc. It is a part of the JBoss ecosystem and in use in the Embedsded AS and Arquillian projects.

Here’s how it looks to use ShrinkWrap: 

Archives.create("app.war", WebArchive.class).addPackage(recursive, Package.getPackage("org.jclouds")).as(ZipExporter.class).export(Stream)

One integration idea is to utilize ShrinkWrap to move or create configurations on cloud storage. Here’s how that might look: 

Archives.create("test",ZipImporter).import(Jclouds.OsStream).as(OSConfiguration.class).setMemory(1G).as(ZipExport.class).export(JClouds.OsStream)

jclouds is very excited about the ShrinkWrap story and the potential to use it to freeze and retarget cloud workloads. Thanks to Aslak for presenting!

enStratus and Dasein Cloud
Presented by nspollution

enStratus is a enterprise-focused cloud broker with a console to control multiple clouds. By enterprise, it ensures IT policies and procedures can be enforced in the cloud. These include key management, user management, data encryption, SLA management, backups, DR, BCP. It uses an open source project Dasein Clouds to facilitate multi-cloud abstraction. Dasein Clouds follows the JDBC model; It prescribes a series of interfaces for virtual hardware and network services. Then, implementations are created for different APIs.

Here’s how it looks to find all servers in a specific region using Dasein: 

cloudProvider.getServerServices(region).list();

George from Dasein is currently collaborating with jclouds to facilitate some of its abstractions, such as compute and storage. This is currently underway and has a goal of adding vCloud support to Dasein.

RimuHosting
Presented by ivan__

RimuHosting offers cloud servers, or VPSs, via a ReST api. They also offer dedicated servers. Dedicated servers can be traditional or configured with a Xen stack, under which case Rimu can manage your VPSs for you. One differentiator they have is scaling a single server. For example, someone can start on a 160mb vps, and then eventually let grow that to a 16-core dedicated server.

Ivan Meredith has been highly involved in the OSS cloud world, and jclouds is the 3rd project he’s written support for: first libclouds, then deltacloud. Ivan believes jclouds is unique in allowing for a simple api, yet still allowing Rimu to wrap up features that are only used 1% of the time.

The Rackspace Cloud
Presented by greenisus

Rackspace is pretty popular and offers the cloud norms such as spin up instances, resize, reboot, etc. Their offering also includes CDN and storage management. The most echoed differentiator from the chatroom is the quality of the ReST apis they present. Rackspace apis were some of the first jclouds features and we foresee that strong relationship carrying forward.

Mike Mayo wrote the Rackspace Cloud iPhone application and will be soon building an android application for their cloud. He’s a contributor to jclouds and an adviser on our android integration project.

jclouds-android
Presented by mihaicampean and bogdan_popa

Mihai has been taking interest in android since last year 1.0 release. In this time, he’s created two android projects: aegis-shield and jclouds-android. jclouds-android is a proof of concept application. When complete, it will be a twitter client which runs on the jclouds framework.

Terracotta
Presented by jvoegele

Terracotta is java infrastructure software that extends the java memory model across a cluster. This allows for somewhat transparent clustering of java applications. Among other use cases, testing shows they have by far the fastest hibernate 2nd level cache to be found anywhere. They recently acquired ehcache and its primary maintainer greg luck, as well the quartz scheduler project. Under Terracotta, these projects will have tighter integration and cluster readiness.

Terracotta are working with jclouds to create tools that dynamically provision terracotta server and client nodes. We are also working with the cargo project on this. The goal is to make it easier for those who love Terracotta to manage it inside or outside of the cloud, by improving tools they already use.

vCloud Express
Presented by wattersjames

vmWare vCloud, unlike other clouds is more of a software based offering. vCloud Express is offered by various hosting companies, such as Terremark and Hosting.com. They see jClouds as unique because it not only is a translation layer for their API, but is also more directly programmable and integrated right into Java.

vmWare have been quite supportive of the jclouds project, from sponsoring time, to facilitating discussions with the ecosystem. James has been a great part of the jclouds story and has also helped promote collaborative projects as well.

Concluding Notes

We’ve invited the entire ecosystem, including those who couldn’t make this irc session to participate in our new Compute Abstraction Design. Please also reach out to us, if you have an jclouds integration story, or would like help getting your jclouds story started.