Support for Automating Cloud Services

November 3, 2009

We are happy to announce a new tool from Tap In Systems. The Tap In Systems Control Plan Editor allows you to model your IT processes using well know modeling techniques. You can then invoke cloud services based on the state of your modeled environment. This technique allows you to fit the cloud around YOUR procedures and policies rather than the other way around.

We are making our Control Plan Editor tool freely available via download in the resources section of this site. If you are trying to figure out how cloud services can fit in your organization, try our tool. It includes templates for using cloud APIs from Amazon, GoGrid, Rackspace and Terremark (vCloud). This tool can run independently from our Cloud Monitoring Service (CMS), but can also trigger automation from CMS events.

We will be releasing more content around this tool over the next few months so stay tuned.

Peter

Updated - November 15, 2009.

We've now made available additional resources that will help you automate deployment of your cloud services.

As noted in my last blog, our Control Plan Editor tool is now available as a free download.
For a limited amount of time, we will providing free support for initial users of the Control Plan Editor. If you are interested, please apply by sending us an email at support@tapinsystems.com. Support may include the following:
- Help in designing Control Plans (Petri Net models) that model your processes.
- Developing APIs that you might require are not yet included in our template library.
- Help in coding and/or debugging your Control Plans.
We have created a wiki site that will contain documentation and samples of monitoring code, automation scripts, Control Plans, cloud vendor APIs, etc. that we have developed. Though not yet complete, we will be continuing to add to this site as we create more content.
We have created a forum site that enables you to communicate with our engineers regarding use of our products, or any cloud management topics.

Our objective with the wiki and forum sites is to create a community resource that will be useful to cloud automation developers or users.

With the Control Plan Editor tool, we think that our approach toward systems automation is unique. The philisophy is to break the link between modeling and programing or tools. First model your process to meet your objectives, which should be independent of your tools or vendors. Implementation is done after modeling. The benefits of this approach is:

You will have a rigorous definition and documentation of your processes that is independent of vendor or tools.
Easing implementation of systems automation with a methodology that is driven by operational processes, not application developers.
Easing maintenance of systems automation that is visible by and owned by the operations organization.
You can exploit any vendor cloud services by mapping the appropriate service to your processes.

This approach is outlined in more detail in our Automating Cloud Services white paper. Though we are focused on automating cloud services, it can be used generically to automate any IT systems process. We believe with these latest changes, cloud users can benefit from our technology even if they don't purchase our services! In the near future, you can expect Tap In Systems to provide additional capabilites build around this technology. As always, we look forward to your comments!

Regards,

Peter