Wow - how hard is this to get started?

Graham,

Sorry to hear you're having difficulty getting started with the Appistry software. That's definitely not what we want! Let's try to clarify a couple of things and see where we can quickly go from here.

First, when you say “GUI that allows us to manage our AMI’s”, we need to understand exactly what is meant by that, and determine if Appistry’s CloudIQ Manager was designed to meet that need.

If you are trying to bring EC2 AMIs up and down as with RightScale and ElasticFox, and manage individual AMIs, CloudIQ Manager was not designed to do that specific function, and is not an Amazon EC2-specific product. CloudIQ can run on both physical and virtual infrastructure in private and public clouds.

With CloudIQ Manager, the expectation is that you would typically have one AMI with your operating system of choice and CloudIQ installed on it (pre-built Appistry AMIs are available on EC2). Multiple instances of that AMI would be spun up, which would form a cloud managed by the CloudIQ Platform. You would then deploy versioned service and application packages onto this cloud. CloudIQ Manager assures that all of the virtual servers in your cloud have the correct versions of your packages installed, and that the service/application lifecycles are managed (started, stopped, etc.). At the very least, you avoid maintaining multiple AMIs. Second, you get simple management. The many servers in your cloud can be controlled in a simple manner with single commands, instead of one server at a time. However, we feel it goes beyond that. We feel that this layered approach to software deployment and management can give you finer grained control over deployment and management.

We are more than happy to answer any questions here on the forums. If that process becomes too much of a pain or if you have a need for privacy on details, we can email directly (my contact info below). We understand that you are on tight evaluation timelines. Could you reply with specific details about what your goal is, and the problem(s) you are trying to solve? Many different types of companies work with our software to address a wide-range of problem-spaces....

Thanks,

Guerry
guerry -at- appistry.com

This post by pradnya was a duplicate of another dedicated Topic. When possible, we will respond on that other thread.

http://www.appistry.com/community/forums/content/building-private-cloud