Cloudmesh Version 0

The initial version of cloudmesh that supported multi cloud environments early on. It included a commandline tool for managing VMS.

Main Features

  • Easy management of multiple clouds in cloudmesh while supporting various native libraries.
  • Portability library to access information in regards to images, flavors, and vms
  • Management of hundreds/thousands of virtual machines
  • Integration of non FutureGrid cLouds by users into cloudmesh so users can access them from cloudmesh
  • A command line shell
  • A web interface
  • Local instalation of cloudmesh on the users computer

Cloudmesh 0.1 – Native protocol for multicloud access

Cloudmesh was part of the effort of FutureGrid to provide a simple experiment management functionality.

Originally cloudmesh was just a command line tool that was able to start hundreds of VMs on various clouds in order to conduct stress testing of cloud deployments. There was no comparable tool available. Our requirements were simple, but none of the tools fulfilled the following requirements:

  • Start hundreds of VMs from the command line with a simple command
  • Delete the VMs from a user through the command line
  • provide native support of the cloud and not just using a wrapper library such as libcloud or a standard such as OCCI (we wanted to debug the cloud and not the wrapper libraries or standards)
  • Elementary display on which VMs run where.
  • Deploy a stand alone version of cloudmesh

Through this tool we were able to identify issues with our clouds and improve the deployment.

Other tools that we tried to use were hiding these issues as they for example did not use the native API protocol, but instead used alternative protocols such as EC2 in case of our OpenStack clouds. As a user this may be ok, but as a resource provider such limitation is naturally problematic.

Cloudmesh 0.2 – Web Browser Interface

Next we replaced the curses based user interface with a web browser based user interface. This made it possible to more easily develop more sophisticated interfaces in General.

At the same time we reused our python command shell interpreter cmd3 so that it is more easily possible to develop command line tools automatically from the commands we already developed as part of the command shell anyways.

A command shell is obviously important as it allows us to describe experiments as scripts.

Cloudmesh 0.3 – Portal Interface

Base on the success from the earlier versions and the use of a web browser as interface, it became clear that users could benefit from our effort. Thus we started to generalize the framework a bit and work towards distributing cloudmesh as a single user environment while users can install a stand alone version of the software.

Based on this internal success of cloudmesh we started thinking it would be good to expose the functionality also to users.

Cloudmesh 0.4 – Database for VM Status

In cloudmesh 0.4 we transformed the store of the VM, flavor, and images into a database, we also moved the development of the code in a new Github Cloudmesh repository.

Cloudmesh 0.5 - 0.7

The following important changes took place:

  • Introduction of a role based authentication theme
  • Adding FG authentication from the portal account
  • Tngesting users either from a yaml file or LDAP directory
  • Adding capabilities to list vms, flavors, and images from AWS, Azure, EC2 (via libcloud) and OpenStack natively.
Last modified October 6, 2020: reorganize versions (f7595be)