This is highly relevant in the cloud world because innovation is happening at break neck speed…..
Lets put everything in a context of a web application
See the animation. DirectConnect
Autodesk story – Paul Cochrane…
The key advance was using our continuous build system to build not only the artifact from source code, but the complete software stack, all the way up to a deployable image in the form of an AMI (Amazon Machine Image for AWS EC2).
Cloud-init supports several different mechanisms for passing data to the instance including ways to pass larger, more structured data and a way to provide a script that is executed at instance launch time.
Till now people who wanted to evaluate MCollective had to go through a manual process of starting first the ActiveMQ instance, gathering some data and then start a number of other instances supplying user data for the ActiveMQ instance. This was by no means a painful solution but CloudFormation can make this much better.
Remember TVs without remote control. We had to walk up to the television set (hardware) to change the channel or the volume. Now we have remote controls, we sit back relax on our couch and control the hardware with our finger tips. Cloud APIs are remote control of the cloud hardware. You don’t have the need to walk up to your hardware, you don’t have to hug your servers anymore. You let go of your (physical) control but retain your ownership
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