{"id":8219,"date":"2015-07-01T13:30:09","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T11:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/?p=8219"},"modified":"2015-07-01T13:27:22","modified_gmt":"2015-07-01T11:27:22","slug":"cloud-orchestration-hurtle-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/cloud-orchestration-hurtle-released\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud Orchestration: Hurtle Released"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are proud to announce that the ICCLab has released Hurtle<\/strong>!<\/p>\n

\"Hurtle \"Hurtle\"<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hurtle<\/a> is a result of the ICCLab’s Cloud Orchestration Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What is hurtle?<\/h2>\n

With\u00a0Hurtle<\/a>,\u00a0you automate the life-cycle management of any number of service instances\u00a0<\/em>in the cloud, from deployment of resources all the way to configuration and runtime management (e.g., scaling) of each instance. Our motivation is that software vendors\u00a0often face questions such as “How can I easily provision and manage new instances of the service I offer for each new customer?”, this is what Hurtle aims to solve.<\/p>\n

In short,\u00a0Hurtle<\/a>\u00a0lets you:<\/p>\n

offer your software as a service i.e. “hurtle it!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Hurtle terms, a\u00a0service represents an abstract functionality that, in order to be performed, requires a set of resources, such as virtual machines or\u00a0storage volumes,\u00a0and an orchestrator which describes what has to be done\u00a0at each step of a service lifecycle.
\nA \u201cservice instance\u201d is the concrete instantiation of a service functionality with its associated set of concrete resources and service endpoints.<\/p>\n

On top of this,\u00a0Hurtle has been designed since its inception to support service composition, so that you can design\u00a0complex services by (recursively!) composing simple ones.<\/p>\n

Hurtle’s\u00a0functionality revolves around the idea of services as\u00a0distributed systems composed of multiple sub-applications, so the services offered are\u00a0also ones that can be designed with the cloud in mind, based on the cloud-native application research<\/a> of the ICCLab<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to offer software as a service?<\/h2>\n

A bit of history first. Traditionally software has been ran locally, then was centralised and shared through intra-nets. All of this was still on company-specific infrastructure. This made hosting, provisioning and managing such software difficult and the full time job of many IT engineers and system administrators.<\/p>\n

This quickly brought about the argument that IT in a SME\u00a0or an\u00a0enterprise was a cost centre<\/a> that should be minimised and lead to outsourcing of such tasks to 3rd parties.<\/p>\n

Now today with the ever growing acceptance and use of cloud computing the cost equation is again further reduced, but more interestingly, cloud computing reverses the trend of outsourcing operations to third parties if you consider the movement of devops.<\/p>\n

In this new world organisations that create software don’t want nor need third parties to manage their software deployments. They have much of the tooling needed, developed in-house. If they don’t, yet still want to follow a devops approach they’ve quite an amount of work ahead of them.<\/p>\n

It is in this scenario where hurtle<\/a> can help!<\/p>\n

What can hurtle do?<\/h2>\n