RightScale, Scalr, EnStratus: Comparing the APIs

Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in May, I took a look at three cloud management platforms: RightScale, Scalr, and enStratus. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that people from two of those companies—RightScale and Scalr—took note of the article and replied in the comments, offering some clarification on their offerings. (And they were very civil: thank you!) What I'd like to do next is re-visit these platforms, but focus directly on the APIs that the three offer—not so much coding, but a high-level picture of them. How do they stack up? What features do they have? How do they fit with standards? And what can you expect from the long-term?"

Comments

Re:A pretty good article.

[tweek]

Disclaimer, I work for enStratus and had a hand in the support for Puppet/Chef in enStratus.

I'm not going to get in a religious war over Chef vs. Puppet but one thing enStratus DOES have is support for both Puppet and Chef. And not some sort of bastardized support either:

Chef - http://docs.enstratus.com/configuration_management/chef.html
Puppet - http://docs.enstratus.com/configuration_management/puppet.html

Note that the Puppet support requires a small agent on the Puppet master but that was unavoidable. Puppet is great but it lacks a proper API that third party services can integrate with. Regardless of which CM system you use, enStratus punts all configuration management tasks to those tools natively and gets out of the way. In the case of Puppet, we use the agent to pregenerate your cert, sign that cert and also add the node the Puppet Dashboard ENC. When the newly provisioned node comes online, we kick off a normal puppet run ('puppet agent --onetime --no-daemonize --detailed-exitcodes --logdest=/some/logfile' if your curious). We don't set puppet to run via cron or as a daemon. That's an internal policy matter for you to decide and should be driven by your puppet modules and not some third party.