The team over at CloudKick have been busy connecting open standards with its efforts to monitor cloud computing. By focusing on different cloud providers and listening to customers, the company is in a good position to nudge cloud computing implementations towards open source – and live to tell about it.
libCloud: Unifying Cloud Interfaces
The company’s decision last year to move its work on libCloud into the Apache Foundation incubator project seems to be taking off. The project it has been growing in contributors to the effort as well as the number of cloud implementations that are supported.
The libCloud incubator project is designed to allow developers to interface with common functions across cloud providers with one library and to grow the support with the growth of cloud vendors.
Here is the current status of support offered in this library.
HTML 5 and Real Time Cloud Visualization
Additionally, the company is demonstrating it’s HTML 5, Canvas, and JavaScript implementation of its visualization tool of real-time cloud resources. This tool shows some of the promise of HTML 5 and also demonstrates the power of CloudKick’s monitoring services and the power of visualization in real-time.
Here is how it looks when getting started. The axes are orientated around response time (ping), CPU utilization, and memory utilization. (View demo live)
Here we see clicking on one of the dots (which represent a server host), a control panel pops up with real-time stats.
Monitoring Open Source Implementations
CloudKick has also opened up monitors customized for other open source implementations, such as Cassandra and Apache to its list of pre-configured monitors.
The company also announced support of Memcached and DNS at the same time.
CloudKick has been a first-mover in abstracting and connecting cloud services together for the practical purpose of supporting applications. In a way, the company seems to be supporting projects that it loves (e.g. Cassandra) and is keeping up with innovative developers who are using the latest software techniques to scale in the cloud.
Are there other services you would like to see unify within cloud vendors?
