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Charon: Declarative provisioning and deployment

Abstract:

We introduce Charon, a tool for automated provisioning and deployment of networks of machines from declarative specifications. Building upon NixOS, a Linux distribution with a purely functional configuration management model, Charon specifications completely describe the desired configuration of sets of “logical” machines, including all software packages and services that need to be present on those machines, as well as their desired “physical” characteristics. Given such specifications, Charon will provision cloud resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances) as required, build and deploy packages, and activate services. We argue why declarativity and integrated provisioning and configuration management are important properties, and describe our experience with Charon.

Published in: 2013 1st International Workshop on Release Engineering (RELENG)

Date of Conference: 20-20 May 2013

Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 26 September 2013

Electronic ISBN:978-1-4673-6441-6

DOI: 10.1109/RELENG.2013.6607691

Conference Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

I Introduction

An essential part of the software life cycle is to deploy software to its target environment. In a cloud-based, infrastructure-as-a-service setting, this also involves provisioning the cloud resources that constitute the target environment. These actions should be automated: given a specification of the desired system configuration, a deployment tool should automatically create the required cloud resources and deploy the necessary software packages and configuration files.

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