Announcing… PoolParty! An Open Source tool for managing EC2 clusters
tim on June 5th, 2008 No Comments
Is your EC2 server pool starting to look like this?
PoolParty can help you turn it into this:
Why would I need PoolParty?
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud has made it cheap and straightforward to run your own server pool, but there are various issues with volatility, lack of load balancing between instances, no persistent instance storage (currently in private beta). Also there is no mechanism for scaling your instances dynamically (ie, adding or removing instances as your load changes).
That is all taken care of by PoolParty, a recently open sourced Ruby gem and the brainchild of fellow 
CitrusByte developer Ari Lerner. PoolParty takes care of the following:
- Automatic scaling based on demand and load
- Starting/stopping instances
- Self-healing
- Provisioning and bootstrapping initial software
- Setting up S3Fuse
- Load balancing with HAProxy
- Built-in monitoring
- Plug-in architecture for extendability / customization
How?
PoolParty is based on established open source technologies that have been widely used in production. It takes your EC2 server pool, and invites S3Fuse, monit, and members of the High Availability Linux Project . Now you don’t just have a pool. You have a rocking pool party. All you have to do is sign those invites! (In other words: just provide a config file and you’re done).
More Information
You can check it out at the official PoolParty website. Tutorials, walk-throughs and articles are coming soon.
If you are interested in active development, check out the source at github. Active discussion is on the PoolParty Google Group
Here are the slides from the talk Ari gave at RailsConf sessions (also available here):
