Architecture
The provisioning architecture is organized around the notions of Providers and Nodes.
Providers have an associated provider_type, which corresponds to a Controller, or Driver. Drivers are either libcloud’s Drivers, or any driver found in the provisioning/plugin/ directory. Examples of Providers: Rackspace, EC2 (with its various regions, each region being a separate Provider), GoGrid, Slicehost, etc. (see the list of Providers supported by libcloud).
Provider Plugins can range from very simple, like the Dedicated Hardware plugin, to a full-fledged libcloud Driver.
Nodes are any server, be it virtual or physical. Examples of Nodes: Rackspace instances, EC2 instances.
A Node has the following main attributes (which can be set via either the Web interface or the REST API):
- name
- realm (this is the equivalent of a Rackspace Datacenter, or an EC2 Region)
- flavor (this is the equivalent of a Rackspace instance size, or an EC2 instance type)
- image (this is the equivalent of a Rackspace server image, or an EC2 AMI)
