I’ve been hearing lots of questions on IRC, mailing lists and elsewhere about the “new” Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure product (which replaces the older UEC). The new product is based on OpenStack and ships with Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10. Currently if you’re a developer or tester who wants to “play” with that product, your best bet is to grab the Ubuntu Cloud Live USB stick image here. Boot that on any AMD64 box and start launching cloud instances.
However if you’re looking to deploy Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure on a larger scale, the Ubuntu server team has your back! Here’s what needs to be done:
- You will need enough hardware boxes for a scalable deployment (at least six boxes, or fewer with certain tricks to collocate services on the bootstrap node)
- You will need to setup an Orchestra automatic network installation system. This is documented in my previous article about deploying server fleets (part1, part2)
- Afterwards, you will need to setup juju to “control” the Orchestra machines. This is documented here
- The final step is to checkout the Ubuntu Cloud juju charms, and start deploying components. Needed docs are here!
Big kudos to the Ubuntu Server team, who built such great tools in such a short time frame! This is some really impressive work. Also big thank yous go to Adam Gandelman and Andres Rodriguez for writing most of the documentation above and integrating many of the pieces together. Again awesome accomplishments
Want to build your own cloud? Ubuntu has your back! This automated hardware deployment (Orchestra) and next-gen Service deployment (Juju) framework is available to you today for free. The Ubuntu Server team is also working hard to make this rock solid for the 12.04 release. Enjoy 
Let me know your thoughts folks, shoot me a comment
