[ANNOUNCE] Introducing cloud deployable format conversion library

Tomas Sedovic tsedovic at redhat.com
Tue Dec 11 13:01:58 UTC 2012


Good News, Everyone!

I'm happy to announce Cloud Babel Fish (CBF). It's a library for
converting between the various cloud deployable formats (such as our
deployable XML, the CloudFormation templates, etc.).

Currently, we only support conversion from Aeolus deployables to
Heat/CloudFormation templates but adding new parsers/generators should
be easy.

I will use this in the ongoing Heat integration effort, but there is
nothing Heat or Aeolus-specific here. If we (or someone else) add new
formats, anyone can easilly use this for any purpose.

Besides the Heat integration, we could use CBF to provide the backwards
compatibility or migration path for our deployables as they evolve. Not
to mention supporting other formats (TOSCA, Juju, anything else that may
come up) in the future.

The code is on GitHub, licensed under Apache 2.0:

https://github.com/tomassedovic/cbf


A few questions/ideas to the Aeolus community:

* Is this something you would like to see under Aeolus Incubator or
(later) Aeolus proper? If so, we should do the switch sooner rather than
later.

* We could set up a simple web service that provides the conversion by
calling CBF on the background once we have more formats. There should be
none of the security concerns that hosting Deltacloud or Conductor would
have. There are no users, credentials, side effecs or any sensitive data
other than the user-submitted templates.

* I've little experience with packaging in (Rubygems, RPM, deb) so if
anyone were to look at the gemspec and give me a few pointers, I'd be
very grateful.

* The name can be changed if you don't like it. Suggestions are welcome.

* Any comments on the code or its structure will be appreciated as well.
This is the first proper Ruby library I've written, so it's quite
possible I'm doing things differently from what seasoned Rubyists would
expect.

Take care,
Thomas


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