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.
Phantom has been introduced to the FutureGrid community at the XSEDE 2012 conference with examples from early Phantom users. A generally available Phantom FutureGrid service (alpha) was announced earlier this year.
Since then the FutureGrid Phantom service has deployed over 14,000 virtual machines on behalf of 26 users using it as a portal to multiple FutureGrid clouds, to cloud burst from FutureGrid to Amazon EC2, or to leverage its monitoring, scalability and high availability features. If you want to try Phantom too, follow our documentation page that will get you started very quickly.
We are continuously working hard to make Phantom a more powerful platform for FutureGrid. We are planning exciting new features in the fall!
