FAQ¶
What is CloudSlang?
CloudSlang is an open source project to automate your development and operations use cases using ready-made workflows. CloudSlang uses a process-based approach to orchestrating popular technologies, such as Docker and CoreOS in an agentless manner. You can use the ready-made CloudSlang content or define your own custom workflows that are reusable, shareable and easy to understand.
What are the use cases and focus for CloudSlang?
CloudSlang can orchestrate a wide variety of technologies. Currently, our ready-made content focuses on popular DevOps technologies, such as Docker and CoreOS.
What is the difference between orchestration and configuration management?
CloudSlang is not a traditional PaaS framework, although it can be used to orchestrate one. PaaS platforms such as OpenShift or Cloud Foundry focus primarily on common application stacks and architectures, and are designed to improve developer productivity by making it easy to develop and deploy new, simple applications.
CloudSlang, is designed to orchestrate complex, non-trivial, process-based workflows. For example, CloudSlang content allows you to integrate with the OpenShift or Cloud Foundry (Stackato) PaaS platforms to orchestrate application lifecycle creation.
How is CloudSlang different than configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, Salt and Ansible? Can I use it with these tools?
Configuration management (CM) tools like Chef, Puppet, Salt and Ansible are great for configuring individual servers and preparing them for service. Given a server and a desired state, they will make sure to take all the required steps to configure that server so that it ends up in the desired state.
As a Runbook Automation open source product, CloudSlang will allow you automate many uses cases, such as application or server provisioning. It will take all the steps required to realize that application stack. This includes provisioning infrastructure resources on the cloud (compute, storage and network), assigning the right roles to each provisioned VM, configuring this CM (which is typically done by CM tools), injecting the right pieces of information into each tier, starting them up in the right order, continuously monitoring the instances of each tier, healing on failure and scaling tiers when needed.
CloudSlang can indeed integrate with CM tools as needed for configuring individual VMs, and in fact this a best practice. For example, CloudSlang provides ready-made content for integrating with Chef.
What is the quickest way to try out CloudSlang?
Follow the directions on the CloudSlang website or head over to the Get Started section to download CloudSlang and run your first CloudSlang content.
Which languages are supported by CloudSlang?
Python and Java operations are supported natively in CloudSlang.
What other technologies does CloudSlang integrate with?
CloudSlang was built out of the box to work with your favorite technologies. For example, not only are OpenStack and Docker technologies are supported, but also configuration management tools like Chef. There’s also support for bash (for *nix systems) and PowerShell (for Windows) and basic operations for REST or SOAP. To see a complete list of technologies that CloudSlang integrates with, see the ready-made content repository.
We’re not looking to replace great tools, we work with them. So many of the tools you’re used to working with are already supported by CloudSlang. The CloudSlang team, along with its growing open source community, are constantly expanding the list of tools we work with, so if you’re favorite tool isn’t supported yet, there’s a good chance it will be soon. Of course, we encourage and support contributions from the community. (In fact, this very answer you’re reading was contributed by a member of the community.)