Community
From ControlTier
Welcome to the ControlTier project community page! This is where the ControlTier project discussion and resources can be found.
Contents |
The people
Who are the people in this community?
- Anybody responsible for managing an online service but is finding it hard to manage it because of the rising scale and complexity of their application deployments
- Anybody that is interested in developing and using "automated and abstracted administration"
- See the who's who in the community page for a list of the more active people you'll find in the google group and the #controltier irc channel
The project
What are the goals of this project?
- Create a framework and paradigm that will allow online business operators to scale up their capabilities, shorten release cycles, improve operation quality, and simplify process.
- Develop ideas, best practices and technologies that support the "automated, abstracted administration" concept.
Ambitious to be sure but we're seriously taking it on!
The software
The ControlTier project is really a broad effort. We are tackling the problem in various ways, each of which might be supported by its own software effort.
Here are the software projects currently under development:
- CTL: Distributed command dispatching framework: CTL architecture
- Workbench: Design workbench and resource model repository (aka CMDB).
- Ctlcenter: Web-based graphical interface to CTL that also supports executing timed jobs and reporting
- Moduleforge: Collection of reusable CTL commands and workflows
All these projects are distributed in a single installer that we say comprise "ControlTier".
What powers ControlTier?
ControlTier software was not written all from scratch. It leverages a great deal of other well known open source projects. Here are just some of the projects that underly the ControlTier components: Jetty, Grails, Jackrabbit, Ant, ant-contrib, BSF, Groovy, JSCH, Quartz, HSQL, commons, castor, lucene, Jena, Log4j, dom4j, IzPack.
The license
We believe this kind of software project must be open source because it is a new technology space and therefore ideas and code should be easily transferable. All projects are licensed under Apache 2.0.
The vision
The following defines what we mean as the Control Tier:
A Business Service is a system of software applications and configurations, hardware, people and processes that coordinate to provide some Service. Designing the Business Service's operations and keeping it running smoothly is the goal of your Service Management Team. Think of the Business Service as the "Factory Floor" of your company, and your Service Management Team as the operators, designers and builders of all of the machines on your Factory Floor.
The Control Tier is the broad layer of coordination that is implicit in the management of a Business Service. It is typically not automated in a standard way. The ControlTier software is designed to provide this layer of automation and management in a centralized, visible way.
Your Business Service environment consists of a number of different activities and roles. All of these activities affect change in the environment, and typically depend on each other to further their common goal. Each role has a set of responsibilities that sometimes overlap and whose activities may interfere with one another.
ControlTier lets you clearly manage the diverse components, and define who is responsible for which activity. It serves as the base for coordination of activities as well as the place where change can be both controlled and visualized.
The ControlTier software provides a drawing-board to design and develop reusable control systems that can help manage this layer and keep the Factory Floor running smoothly.
