Think about bzr or git circa 2004/2005, or apt circa 1998/1999, or even dpkg circa 1993/1994... That's where we are today with Ensemble circa 2011.
Ensemble is a radical, outside-of-the-box approach to a problem that the Cloud ecosystem is just starting to grok: Service Orchestration. I'm quite confident that in a few years, we're going to look back at 2011 and the work we're doing with Ensemble and Ubuntu and see an clear inflection point in the efficiency of workload management in The Cloud.
From my perspective as the leader of Canonical's Systems Integration Team, Ensemble is now the most important tool in our software tool belt when building complex cloud solutions.
Period.
Juan, Marc, Brian, and I are using Ensemble to generate modern solutions around new service deployments to the cloud. We have contributed many formulas already to Ensemble's collection, and continue to do so every day.
There's a number of novel ideas and unique approaches in Ensemble. You can deep dive into the technical details here. For me, there's one broad concept in Ensemble that just rocks my world... Ensemble deals in individual service units, with the ability to replicate, associate, and scale those units quite dynamically. Service units in practice are cloud instances (or if you're using Orchestra + Ensemble, bare metal systems!). Service units are federated together to deliver a (perhaps large and complicated) user facing service.
Okay, that's a lot of words, and at a very high level. Let to me try to break that down into something a bit more digestable...
I've been around Red Hat and Debian packaging for many years now. Debian packaging is particularly amazing at defining prerequisites packages, pre- and post- installation procedures, and are just phenomenal at rolling upgrades. I've worked with hundreds (thousands?) of packages at this point, including some mind bogglingly complex ones!
It's truly impressive how much can be accomplished within traditional Debian packaging. But it has its limits. These limits really start to bare their teeth when you need to install packages on multiple separate systems, and then federate those services together. It's one thing if you need to install a web application on a single, local system: depend on Apache, depend on MySQL, install, configure, restart the services...
sudo apt-get install your-web-app ...
Profit!
That's great. But what if you need to install MySQL on two different nodes, set them up in a replicating configuration, install your web app and Apache on a third node, and put a caching reverse proxy on a fourth? Oh, and maybe you want to do that a few times over. And then scale them out. Ummmm.....
sudo apt-get errrrrrr....yeah, not gonna work :-(
But these are exactly the type(s) of problems that Ensemble solves! And quite elegantly in fact.
Once you've written your Formula, you'd simply:
ensemble bootstrap ensemble deploy your-web-app ...Profit!
Stay tuned here and I'll actually show some real Ensemble examples in a series of upcoming posts. I'll also write a bit about how Ensemble and Orchestra work together.
In the mean time, get primed on the Ensemble design and usage details here, and definitely check out some of Juan's awesome Ensemble how-to posts!
After that, grab the nearest terminal and come help out!
We are quite literally at the edge of something amazing here, and we welcome your contributions! All of Ensemble and our Formula Repository are entirely free software, building on years of best practice open source development on Ubuntu at Canonical. Drop into the #ubuntu-ensemble channel in irc.freenode.net, introduce yourself, and catch one of the earliest waves of something big. Really, really big.
:-Dustin
Ensemble keeps sounding awesome, but since I have no cloud - or a need for one ATM for that matter - I wish it would also scale down to a single VPS instance as well. Having a Linode and an ssh connection to it, it would be lovely to have all the power of Ensemble and its recipes. Such old school deployments are possible now with a variety of tools but Ensemble sounds much better than all of them, and if it covered all the spectrum it could get more users and people from the traditional sysadmin/hosting/webdev circles involved.
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