Kirk Haines - Vertebra

Kirk is working for EngineYard on Vertebra

Jordan's Summary

Vertebra is a solution from EngineYard to manage processes in the cloud. Still in development (no production usage so far). Sounds interesting, will probably take a look at their source code if for nothing else than an interesting architecture. Uses XMPP, which I seem keep hearing about these days.

Cloud Computing

Clouds are great b/c it's many, many machines waiting to do you bidding.

Clouds are hard b/c there are many, many machines to manage.

Scripted SSH works, but he says it has its limits. Vertebra built to be 'fault-tolerant operations among autonomous agents'.

Enter Vertebra

Built on XMPP.

• very chatty protocol
• upside to chatty-ness is fault tolerance. back-and-forth paints the picture of message reception.
• goal is: if network dies, operation in progress should be able to pick right up where it left off

For an XMPP Server they use EJabberd

The pieces of Vertebra are agents. E.g. a logger agent.

Special Vertebra Agent: Herault

• originally written in ruby, rewritten in erlang for performance & scalability
• new agents coming on board advertise their capabilities to Herault
• when looking for capabilities ('show me all loggers') you ask Herault
• also handles authorization for dispatching operations
• when asking Herault to dispatch an operation, can specify :all or :single (more options in the works)

Concurrency API

Talking about using vertebra to schedule future units of work that may or may not execute depending on a given set of conditions.