So basically you search in the box for the service you want (Hadoop, haproxy, memcached, postgresql, and so on) and click deploy and then an instance launches with that service on AWS/HP Cloud/OpenStack. You then connect them and basically model your deployment via the web interface.
Then when you want to horizontally scale you just add units to the service.
Sorry that wasn't clear in the blog post, I was mostly targetting existing users and totally forgot to explain what it does: http://juju.ubuntu.com
Nice to see the relationships visualized. I think it's a bit more cloud provisioning focused than, say, general purpose orchestration -- but this is an important problem that needs to be solved too!
For my take on this, see http://ansible.cc -- though I think we've talked already. One of the goals of that was modelling rolling updates and repeated idempotent configuration management, which is something orchestration tools need to be able to do for once those nodes are up (versus say, bash scripts). It doesn't really take on provisioning so much and assumes the nodes already exist.
I'm still thinking there is a good way we could collaborate so you could provide the modeling of the provisioning layer and leverage our backend for actual actions on the nodes (we'd need to write a push_script module, which is easy), since you seem to be doing the SSH thing already, which is the right way to go :)
Founder of http://commando.io here - Really cool interface. We are doing some of the same sort of things to help with orchestration of servers. Currently we are using `libssh2` via a PHP module, but switching to a sparkling new node.js interface for the SSH and SCP connections and executions shortly.
This seems to be more like a Rundeck to me, i.e. parallel script dispatch?
Idempotent models are kind of important when managing systems in production environments as systems can be in heterogenous states and well, scripts fail. Part of the goal should be to get out of the practice of writing scripts.
