Overmind 0.1.0 Released

[Miquel Torres]

I am pleased to present Overmind, a new open source server management
project that leverages libcloud.

The last two years have brought many changes to the devops world. The
advent of Configuration Management systems, with Puppet and Chef as
the main contenders, has brought a host of apps that excel at
specialized taks like server provisioning, app deployment, and more.
But somehow the myriad of efforts are not benefiting each other,
because they serve particular cases, like Rails or Django app
deployment, for example.

With Overmind we aim to change this. By providing an integrated front
end to all your servers, completely provider independent, and
hopefully in the near future configuration management in a vendor
agnostic way by plugging in Chef, kokki, or any CMS, and later even
monitoring, it has the potential to be the basis on which every
organization can build its IT infrastructure, hooking in whatever
software they want to use to administer their servers.

Two months ago, I devised a roadmap to get to a complete lifecycle
solution. We have now completed the first milestone.

The current features are centered around a unified front-end for
clouds, custom server providers and dedicated hardware:
- Basic Web UI
- EC2 and Rackspace server provisioning. All libcloud drivers will be
supported as soon as there is some testing
- Provider plugins. Custom providers can be integrated into Overmind.
The "Dedicated Hardware" plugin allows to import any server by
specifying its IP
- REST API for providers and nodes
- Authentication with three user roles

It is implemented on top of Django and libcloud (see
http://github.com/tobami/overmind/wiki/Architecture for more details)

While it is in a very early stage, it is perfectly usable, and should
serve as a demonstration of what can be achieved with this approach.

Thanks go to all libcloud contributors for making this much easier
than it would otherwise have been. We hope that Overmind also benefits
libcloud. In fact, it already has, as Grig has already committed a
patch to be able to create keypairs for EC2.

For the second milestone the priorities will be to add configuration
management and implement a nicer UI (see
http://github.com/tobami/overmind/wiki/Roadmap for some ideas we have)
Contributors are welcome!

You can download Overmind 0.1 from http://github.com/tobami/overmind/downloads

Regards,
Miquel Torres