Announcing Nimbus Phantom Alpha on FutureGrid

We recently released Nimbus Phantom as a hosted service running on FutureGrid. 

Nimbus Phantom is a hosted service, running on FutureGrid, that makes it easy to leverage on-demand resources provided by infrastructure clouds. Phantom allows the user to deploy a set of virtual machines over multiple private, community, and commercial clouds and then automatically grows or shrinks this set based on policies defined by the user. This elastic set of virtual machines can then be used to implement scalable and highly available services. An example of such service is a caching service that stands up more workers on more resources as the number of requests to the service increases. Another example is a scheduler that grows its set of resources as demand grows.

Currently Phantom works with all FutureGrid Nimbus and OpenStack clouds as well as Amazon and the XSEDE wispy cloud (the only XSEDE cloud for now). A user can access it via two types of clients: an easy to use web application and a scripting client. The scripting client is the boto autoscale client as Phantom currently implements Amazon Autscaling API – so you can think of it as Amazon Autoscale for FutureGrid clouds that also allows for cloudburst to XSEDE and commercial clouds and is easy to extend with your own policies and sensors.

The Nimbus Phantom web interface in action

The simplest scenario for using Phantom is as a gateway for deploying and monitoring groups of virtual machines spread over multiple FutureGrid clouds. In a more complex scenario you can use it to cloudburst from FutureGrid clouds to Amazon. Finally, you can use it to explore policies that will automate cloudbursting and VM allocations between multiple clouds.

For more information and/or to use the service go to www.nimbusproject.org/phantom. It should take no more than 10-15 minutes to start your own VMs. Happy scaling and we will appreciate your feedback!