Features
Wide range of supported resources
Occopus supports a wide variety of interfaces for allocating cloud
or container resources. Some of the most widespread supported interfaces are
ec2, nova, docker and Azure. The list of supported interfaces is growing
due to the modular and extensible feature of Occopus.
Hybrid cloud support
Occopus can deploy your infrastucture by allocating each node on a different cloud.
Multiple type of clouds can be used within the same infrastructure, therefore we call
it hybrid cloud support. It is also possible to let Occopus dynamically choose
between a given list of clouds at deployment time. To use multiple resources, nodes
must have multiple implementations and optionally implementations can be filtered in the
infrastructure description.
Multiple configuration management support
Occopus can utilise Chef, Cloud-init, pre-defined images, or any combination of these in the
same infrastructure. Occopus has access to various configuration and contextualization methods:
You can use pre-defined images in the resource section of the node definition
You can use cloud-init as a contextualisation tool
Occopus supports configuration management tools. Currently, Chef is supported.
Different usage possibilities
Occopus functionalities can be utilised in different ways. First, it provides command-line tools
exposing different functionalities to build, query, update or destroy infrastructures. Second,
REST API can be used after Occopus web service has been launched. Finally, orchestration
functionalities can be utilised in your application through the API of the Occopus python library.
Simple YAML format
Occopus uses YAML files for node definitions and infrastructure descriptions,
making them simple, human-readable and easy-to-learn.
Schema checking
Both, infra description and node definition files are analysed and validated by
Occopus by searching for missing or invalid sections and attributes. This helps
users to avoid creating syntactically wrong descriptor files.
Dynamic reconfiguration
Make changes to your infrastructures on the fly with a single command.
Modify the infrastructure description file the way you want - add and remove
nodes, set new paramateres (e.g. scaling) and variables for your nodes and your
infrastructure and modify the dependency graph as you wish.
After updating the infrastructure description in the datastore using
occopus-build command, Occopus will automatically reconfigure the nodes of running infrastructures to match the new definitions.
Health checking
Occopus supports health checking primitives to check if a node is still operating.
These primitives are network availability of the node (ping), checking the connectivity
of a certain port (port access), checking the responsiveness of a web service (url checking) or
checking the connectivity of a mysql database (mysql access).
Auto healing
Occopus monitors the states of the nodes by applying the primitives configured
by health-checking for each node. Once, a node does not fails on health-checking,
it is considered as fail node, Occopus destroys and rebuilds it.
Manual scaling
Scaling up or down any nodes in the infrastructure is supported. Occopus can
launch multiple instances of a certain node, however the infrastructure itself
must be built in a way to handle scaling events.
Multiple node implementations
Occopus supports defining multiple implementations for a node (type) and
utilise different backends, images, tools and variables in them. You can
filter the available implementations in the infrastructure description,
and occopus will select an implementation from the remaining ones.
Multiple authenticators
Occopus can handle multiple authenticators during building an infrastructure
on multiple resource. Multiple resources may have different authenticators and
authentication procedures. Occopus supports defining authenticators and selecting
one of them for a certain resource. The selection can be based on any parameter of
a resource handler, including name, type, image-id, etc.
Extensible architecture
Occopus was created with extensibility and flexibility in mind - New modules for
resource-handlers, configuration-managers, additional schema-checker
rules or health-checking primitives can easily be implemented and added without
modifying other components.