Ezra Introduces Vertebra at RailsConf 2008

Configuration Through the Clouds

2008-06-01

Ezra Z.'s talk at RailsConf 2008 started out normally enough but, his first point of order was to introduce Vertebra. Vertebra is similar in purpose to Capistrano. Instead of using a linear interface such as SSH, Vertebra uses XMPP (the protocol used in Jabber) to deal with thousands of concurrent operations. For me, this is the most exciting announcement of RailsConf not because I do much with cloud computing but, because I want to, and this is just another piece of the puzzle. The whole process of XMPP providing presence -- like jabber instant messaging -- and running on an Erlang implementation of the jabber server that is hugely, horizontally scalable.

It appears that you can use a jabber client or a command-line client to interact with the system. All sorts of things are capable. The examples Ezra gave included everything from requesting RAM and CPU statistics to rebuilding systems. Map/Reduce type scatter/gather dispatch for discovery and deployment is easily possible with the protocol in use.

Ezra coined a new acronym today, CREST, which stands for cloud REST. Along with this Ezra displayed an example that was built on Merb to show a Ruby interaction with the cloud using RESTful processes. Resources have URLs, just as they should.

All in all, this process seems to be a platform that other cloud services could be built upon. I can't wait to dig right in considering he demoed the service running live.