[Techtalk] General advice on cloud computing

Cynthia Kiser cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu
Sun Jun 7 03:03:39 UTC 2009


> My concern: setting up a server/VPS, even to do a single quick job,
> takes time. You have to install the open-source software you need,
> setup ssh-keygen style trust between various machines, and do lots of
> other small things.
> 
> For a simple job, I can do this in under an hour (w/ time enough left
> to actually run my app), but I don't want to do it 100 times. Do cloud
> computing providers offer some sort of "run this command on all 100
> machines at once" command?

I don't have any experience with cloud computing so I can't say who,
if any, offer that sort of automation. It isn't unreasonable to look
for, I just don't know if it is part of any package. 

If you don't find something from your cloud provider, you might want
to look at Capistrano. It was developed for deploying Rails web apps
and that is still a good portion of it's market. But it has a really
nice 'cap shell' that will establish ssh connections to a bunch of
servers and run a command or commands on all of them. See the "simple
example" section of http://www.capify.org/getting-started/basics/

Sadly, unless pushing a public key is part of the VM creation script,
I fear you may have to log into each VM manually at least once to set
up trust. 

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu


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