Rapid application configuration in Amazon cloud using configurable virtual appliances
Huan Liu · 2011
Virtual Appliance (VA) promises to dramatically change how software is distributed, installed and configured. Although it simplifies some aspects of the process, it falls short of solving the complete problem. Furthermore, it introduces additional management hassles because of the proliferation of VAs, one for each commonly used scenario. Borrowing the Spring IoC (Inversion of Control) concept from the Java community, we propose a new approach which includes three components: Configurable VAs (similar to a Java class), separate configuration metadata (similar to a configuration file), and the Rapid Application Configurator (RAC) container (similar to the Spring IoC container). The separation of concerns allows each component to be independently developed and the cost to be effectively amortized. We describe the design and implementation of RAC in the Amazon EC2 environment.