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Application Provisioning

With the right system configuration in place, it’s time to install the applications. So why not use the same tools we used for the OS and middleware? Do we need yet another set of tools?”

It depends. You can use the same set of tools for middleware to install some applications. The middleware appears like an application to the OS as well. The difference is whether your application is stable enough and whether you need to customize per node. The tools like Puppet can be good for stable applications that can be deployed the same way across all nodes. If your application is still a work in progress and you need flexibility to tweak it, you need more specialized application provisioning tools.

The big technical difference between application and middleware provisioning tools is that application tools push the application to the nodes and remotely change anything as needed. The process is procedural.

The middleware provisioning tools normally have agents on the nodes to pull the software based on the prescribed configuration files. The process is declarative.

Beyond the “push” and “pull” difference, the application provisioning tools can also manage the lifecycles of applications (sometimes called services) distributed on different nodes with a single line of command or code. Given the nature of remote command dispatching framework, the application provisioning tool can do almost anything. If there has to be a limitation, it’s your imagination.

So if you develop applications by yourself, you most likely need application provisioning tools.

Let’s see what tools are there. Read more »

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.