Concept

Occopus is an easy-to-use hybrid cloud orchestration tool. It is a framework that provides features for configuring and orchestrating distributed applications (so called virtual infrastructures) on single or multi cloud systems. Occopus can be used by application developers and devops to create and deploy complex virtual infrastructures as well as to manage them at deployment time and at runtime.

It has many similarities with HEAT, Juju, etc. Its main advantage that it is cloud technology neutral, open source and easily extendable. Occopus works based on an infrastructure description that describes the services to be deployed in the cloud (or other type of resource) and the order of their deployment. Occopus deploys the services in the cloud according to deployment order specified in the description.

Occopus not only deploys the services but checks their availability, accessibility i.e. their health before deploying the next service. Furthermore, the description can contain contextualisation information for every deployable service and based on that information Occopus carries out contextualisation for the deployed services. As a result after contextualisation the services can call each other, i.e. they can collaborate to realize a higher level service called as virtual infrastructure.

Occopus can be used in three different ways:

  1. Desktop software (i.e. as command line util): In this case virtual infrastructure developers can run Occopus on their desktop machine and they give the infrastructure description as input to Occopus together with their credentials to the target cloud where they want to deploy theinfrastructure. Based on the description Occopus deploys and activates the infrastructure in the cloud and then exits. Then any potential user can use the infrastructure that were built by Occopus in the cloud(s).

  2. REST API: Occopus can expose its functionalities through a web service with RESTful interface. The functionalities like deployment, management, destroy, etc. can be realized through REST calls.

  3. Library providing the Occopus API: In this case infrastructure developers can create a program that deploys the infrastructure in the cloud by calling the Occopus APIs. APIs provide a more fine-tuned controlling of the deployment, and management process while further functionalities can be added to the extendable Occopus architecture.