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Engine Yard gives clouds a backbone


By Alex Handy
January 15, 2009 — 
It's early yet, but Engine Yard just may be the company that brings light to a cloud-filled sky. In December, this Ruby-focused hosting and development company quietly unveiled Vertebra, an open-source project that uses DNS and XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) to form the secure backbone of future cloud-based applications. Today, Engine Yard officially announced Vertebra 0.3.

Jayson Vantuyl, systems architect and co-founder of San Francisco-based Engine Yard, admits that the Vertebra approach is a new tack against the winds currently blowing the clouds. He said that this cloud management and development framework is focused on applications rather than tracking and maintaining virtual machines.

“We've developed something we call an operation. An operation is a negotiation over the network,” said Vantuyl, describing his company's replacement for virtualized instances of servers. “A lot of people like to put a messaging queue in the middle. We like keeping all the state in the endpoints. We've written a way that when you do your operation, [Vertebra] finds out where it needs to run and runs it.”

Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder and systems architect of Engine Yard.
Vertebra foregoes the classic SOA approach of loading state and information into an enterprise service bus or messaging queue. Instead, each machine knows which other machine it needs to communicate with, and Vertebra handles the transportation issues with XMPP. That means that service buses don't get jammed up when the network goes down, resulting in what Vantuyl says is a more fault-tolerant system.

“The whole assumption that every [server is] always working is horrifying. The scariest thing about Web services is what do you do when the network is down?” said Vantuyl.

His answer is that Vertebra makes sure every endpoint in the cloud can at least pause until things come back online. He said that this keeps Web services from exploding when the network chokes.

That's quite different from typical cloud thinking, where virtualized instances of machines run applications alongside other virtualized machines running load balancers, Web servers and databases.

The Vertebra approach is application-centric, said Vantuyl. He said that the team at Engine Yard first wrote Vertebra, then wrote management software for running a cloud inside. That management software includes role-based security, a workflow and horizontally scalable load management. Some of these were written in Erlang, to scale.

Not your typical ESB
At the heart of Vertebra is XMPP, a protocol more typically associated with the instant-messaging service Jabber. Indeed, Engine Yard currently uses ejabberd, a Jabber server running in Erlang, at its centerpiece.

Jabber, said Vantuyl, is actually “a distributed, federated XML switch.”

Tom Mornini, co-founder and CTO of Engine Yard, said that “XMPP provides transport-level connections. That means it needs two ports you have to open on a firewall if you want to communicate inside and outside of an organization. Even better is when the servers are doing server-to-server connections; it's DNS secured through callbacks.”

As a result, Vertebra simplifies the connecting of clouds by tunneling everything that goes between them through this protocol. The management tools, rather than pass along information about where each process lives, simply stamp each operation with a resource that can be traced back to a hierarchical list.

Thus, said Vantuyl, when a process needs to be killed, the management system needs only know the role-based tags associated with the process rather than the name and IP address of the actual machine that is misbehaving.

Jay Lyman, open-source analyst at the 451 Group, said that the XMPP approach surprised his team. “We thought this was a really interesting use of [XMPP]," he said. "By combining this machine-to-machine communication with [Vertebra's] security and agent discovery framework, it's an innovative and interesting approach to application deployment.

“It's very unique. This goes along with Ruby-on-Rails uptake,” he said, inferring that Engine Yard is working with technology not yet fully accepted by enterprises. “I think it's a very hot project, and it's definitely drawing in a lot of developers and enterprise developers, but at the same time, the real large-scale enterprise Ruby deployments ... they're coming, but they're still not there.”

Vertebra is still in its early stages, and the interface libraries are only available in Ruby. The Engine Yard team expects that open-sourcing the project will bring in a host of translations, allowing other languages to talk to the overarching cloud management and development system.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, open source, Ruby, Vertebra, Engine Yard


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