Aeolus | Overview

Aeolus mission

To free users from cloud lock-in by making the choice of cloud provider -- private, public, or hybrid -- a simple launch-time option.

Aeolus is a single, consistent set of tools to build and manage organized groups of virtual machines across clouds.

So, what does Aeolus need to provide a user to accomplish its mission?

Aeolus Conductor: A way to provide cloud resources to users, manage users' access to and use of those resources, and control users' instances in clouds. This lets users make intelligent choices about which cloud to use.
Aeolus Composer: A way to build cloud-specific images from generic templates, so that users can choose clouds freely using compatible images.
Aeolus Orchestrator: A way to manage clumps of instances in an organized way. Users should be able to automatically bring up a set of different instances on a single cloud or spanning multiple clouds, configure them, and tell them about each other.
Aeolus HA Manager: A way to make instances or clumps of instances in the cloud highly available.

All these things are possible because of the Deltacloud cross-cloud abstraction library. Deltacloud itself is a separate project.

lets a user launch a VM on a cloud, track it through its lifecycle, and clean it up when it is no longer needed.
lets a user easily check how much cloud time she has burned up, set thresholds for alerting her when interesting things happen (a VM crashed, she's about to go over n hours of usage this month). If an admin has defined a per-hour cost for the cloud providers the user is using, the user can check how much actual money has been used and set an alert on it.
lets an administrator group cloud resources for other users, so that they can track and control which resources are used and at what level.
lets a user share access to his VMs with others.
lets a user make an informed choice of which of the available clouds to use, based on cost and QOS data and other useful metrics. Or, lets the user delegate that choice to Conductor itself.
lets the user monitor software and services on the guest, and the health of the guest.
has a truly superior GUI for doing all this.

lets users create a template that defines an image, which we can build for each cloud they are interested in
lets users, as part of building the image, specify arguments to pass into the build process to configure software installation, and also to specify values that will be passed back into the image metadata to be used later
lets users build images for multiple operating systems, including Windows and various Linux flavors
lets users rebuild images from the original template if needed, to update packages for feature enhacements, bug fixes, or security issues

lets users specify a clump of images to launch and configure simultaneously. We want the user's specification to be human readable and portable
lets users specify values to collect at launch-time. The values will influence how the instances configure themselves, either by being interpolated into config snippets in the clump specification, or by being passed directly to the instance post-boot. Launch-time values mean the instances in a clump can be configured differently each time they are launched. (For example, suppose the user wants to specify in advance the timezone the app should run in. They would set that parameter in a form presented at launch-time, and it would be passed through to the instance and applied to the system configuration at boot time.)
lets users provide configuration parameters and tooling for each instance, to be injected and run at launch time. User-provided configuration tooling can do anything including install software packages, set config values, or start and stop services. Config tooling can be in any form that the user's image supports -- puppet manifest, bash script, powershell script are all fine.

lets users include instances or clumps of instances in an HA infrastructure which provides isolation, recovery, and notification of failed applications or instances
lets users specify policy for maintaining or relaunching services within an HA infrastructure

To provide further clarity, it's useful to know what Aeolus isn't.

Aeolus is not:

A part of Linux
Although our packaging efforts currently focus on Linux, Aeolus is not explicitly tied into Linux. It is a suite of applications that run on Linux and related operated systems.
Owned by Red Hat
Although the majority of Aeolus developers are currently sponsored by Red Hat, the project is an independent community effort.
Not a cloud
Aeolus is a project for managing existing clouds (public and private), not an attempt at creating yet another one.