The Cloud Foundations tools come primiarily from the work started at Symantec Corporation for the cloud-platform enginneering division. See the About page for more information.
While not designed together the cloudfoundations tools form an ecosystem of four(4) subclusters: Identity and Access Management, Image creation and Distribution, Machine Domination, and Virtual Machine Management.
Their dependency relastionships can be visualized here:
Two tools belong in this cluster: keymaster and cloud-gate. Both of these tools generate ephemeral credentials for accessing other systems. Keymaster provides: SSH certificates, TLS certificates, and it also provices access as an openid connect provider. Cloud-Gate provides both ephemeral access to AWS tokens and console access to AWS. Cloud-Gate CLI uses keymaster TLS certificates to provide CLI access to AWS tokens.
Keymaster is the base system for authenticating users, it’s design focused on a requirement for 2FA, usability and the goal to be an SSO for both the CLI and the web. Cloud-Gate is the AWS access broker and it was built to overcome the shortcomings of SAML delegation on AWS and to provide delegation of acess control to the teams that actually know who needs to be approved for what.
The imaginator cluster includes all tools for image creation and distribution. The system generates images for AWS, OpenStack, and SmallStack (see below).
SmallStack was the answer to the question of how to manage our fleet of on-prem VMs given the complete shutdown of the OpenStack environment. While there were tools like proxmux that could take over the environment we found them with several limitations.
The first of the cluster of the Cloud-Foundations ecosystem. Designed as an open-source improvement of the Assimilator (an internal Google system used to deploy and update the OS+Borg to physical machines) its goal is machine domination with focus on stateful machines.
The Birther is a system or set of integrated components which can be used to automatically or semi-automatically install (or re-install) an Operating System onto a machine. It manages the very beginning of the life-cycle of a machine once it is physically installed, connected and powered on.
The Cloud Foundations tools include:
| Name | Role | Documents |
|---|---|---|
| Birther | Image-based installation | Design Doc |
| Dominator | Image-based deploy and patching | Design Doc |
| Cloud-Gate | AWS access broker | Design Doc |
| Keymaster | Authentication | Design Doc |
| SmallStack | Virtual Machine Management | Design Doc |
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