I just got back from the International PHP Conference, Spring Edition, and a new company paid my airfare. Makara has asked me to help tell the PHP crowd about their product and establish an OSS community around future projects.
Call me lazy, but I prefer to work on projects that largely sell themselves. Makara is no exception. To boil it down to the bone, Makara is a Linux-based image for the cloud that makes clustering, managing and monitoring your apps on the cloud relatively painless. Fun, even.
What’s particularly interesting to me is that it’s not necessarily a cloud solution; you can run it on bare metal if you so desire. But it really comes in to its own on the cloud. You might say that it is the last mile in your journey to getting your existing apps on the cloud by solving the pesky software problems that come up in cloud-scale deployments.
A public beta will be available soon, but here’s a short teaser list to get you salivating in the meantime:
- One-click clustering
- Consolidated log management for clusters
- Change management backed by SVN
- Full monitoring with a library of slick-looking graphs to impress people with
- Images for all major cloud platforms
- Importable/exportable/resumable application capsules
- Instant install for any part of the application stack, including PHP 5.3 and MySQL, as well as Java.
- A bunch of stuff I can’t be bothered to type up right now
Let’s face it: when it comes to the cloud, PHPers are a bit late to the party. Makara will help us catch up.
,Wil
UPDATE: As of November 30, 2010, what started out as ‘WebAppVM’, then was known as ‘Makara’, has now settled on the name ‘Red Hat’. Congrats, guys!
