07/20/2010: RC1

Full-featured Cloud Manager developed by the Infrastructure and Automation Group of The New York Times Digital

SET UP
	- git clone git://github.com/nimbul/nimbul.git
	- cd nimbul
	- Set up database.yml file
	- Set up config.yml file (repeat as necessary for test and production environments)
	- Change the login and password for the admin user in the _set_up_first_admin_user.rb migration
    - Change the host, user and password for the amqp server in config/broker.yml
	- ./install.sh
	- rake db:create:all or db:create
	- rake db:migrate
	- ./start

CURRENT FEATURES

Web-Based User Interface

Nimbul offers an easy-to-use web-based interface, with standard page elements such as tabs and tables. Most Nimbul "objects" (such as servers and accounts) are linked to detail pages, allowing you to get a quick overview and then click through to get more information or make changes.

When you first log in, a dashboard view gives you quick access to the main system objects and your recent activity. The rest of the Nimbul UI has three main areas:

    - Clusters: View and manage server clusters; launch, reboot and terminate instances; get details about currently running instances; click through to server profiles.
    - Provider Accounts: View and manage cloud provider accounts, including DNS information, IP addresses, storage volumes, images and security settings.
    - Administration: View and manage users, daemons, system messages and exceptions (requires administrator access).

ARCHITECTURE

Nimbul's architecture is straightforward and flexible. Built on the Amazon APIs, Nimbul consists of the following:

    - A library
    - A set of adapters (EC2, SQS, S3, Auto Scaling)
    - The publishers framework
    - The server tasks framework
	- A communication framework
    - The web-based UI

All of these pieces can be customized to suit your cloud provider accounts and local environment.

The following list is just a sampling of Nimbul's features.

    - Enterprise-oriented:
          * Supports clusters, allowing you to "slice" your cloud accounts
          * Supports LDAP and database authentication, as well as SSH access
          * Supports user roles, access rules, firewall rules and security groups
    - Designed to be cloud-agnostic: Version 1.0 of Nimbul supports Amazon EC2 only, but its concepts and structures are designed to be adaptable for most infrastructures and providers.
    - Flexible: Offers a publisher framework, command-line tools and scripts to support operations when the Nimbul UI is unavailable
	
KNOWN ISSUES

TODO
	- Full rSpec test suite
	- Complete Audit Trail for all objects
	- Ongoing: refactoring, support for OpenStack, adapters for other Cloud Providers

PLUGINS
See README.restful_authentication for the list of plugins

RESOURCES
See README.restful_authentication for the list of resources

Copyright (c) 2010 The New York Times, released under Apache 2.0 license