We are very pleased to announce the availability of Ravello Repo. Repo is a library of public blueprints shared by experts in the infrastructure community (individuals and companies), for the benefit of the rest of the community. These blueprints represent multi-VM snapshots of entire application environments with networking and storage. Anybody can copy a blueprint from Repo into their private library and spin up an instance of the application environment in Ravello (on AWS or Google cloud) with one click.
Repo use-case #1: Learning labs for everyone
Repo currently has blueprints of OpenStack labs, Puppet and Ansible testing labs, Linux version migration testing labs, Arista Networks testing labs and more. Anyone who is interested in learning about these subjects can use their existing Ravello account (or open a new Ravello account), and within 5 minutes have a full scale lab to study, practice, customize and use. Say you are studying for your VMware VCDX exams. Or you are practicing for your Cisco CCIE certification. You can use these blueprints as a starting point for a live environment or build and share your own blueprints. The lab environment runs in the public cloud (on Ravello on AWS or Google cloud) and users do not need any local hardware. Users can also edit these lab blueprints and contribute them back to the community via Repo.
Repo use-case #2: Simulating Data center labs for research
Infrastructure experts often need custom the data center labs for research. For example, say you need to see how OpenStack, Docker containers and Mesosphere and next generation firewall technology from Check Point or Palo Alto Networks could work together. With Repo, you can start with a full blown OpenStack environment and add and configure other components as required. Once everything is working well, document your findings and share it with the community.
Repo use-case #3: Labs for software or virtual appliance evaluations
Typically, ISVs have technical marketing and systems engineering teams build out reference architectures and implementation guides for their software. The intent is to help users set up the ISVs software according to the ISVs recommended best practices. For today’s users, that simply isn’t enough because:
- they lack the servers and networking hardware to build out lab environments per ISV specifications.
- they find that building the environments from scratch is difficult and error prone.
- it’s often difficult to get online help for the user’s specific configuration and setup.
With Repo, ISVs or their users can share complete blueprints with the community. New or existing users can spin up entire lab environments without any hardware. This speeds up the evaluation process for users and the sales cycles for the ISVs. Users can also customize their environments and easily share it with the ISV or the broader community to assist in case of problems.
Repo doesn’t cost anything
There is no charge to copy a blueprint from Repo or to post a blueprint to repo. Once a user copies a blueprint from Repo into their own Ravello account, they will be charged a nominal storage cost (typically a few cents per month) to store the blueprint in their account. They only pay for compute and volume storage when they run an application instance from the blueprint in their Ravello account.
We’d love to hear your feedback - once you’ve checked out the blueprints on Repo, let us know what you think and what else you’d like to see there - via twitter @ravellosystems or in the comments section below.
The post Introducing Repo: A community repository for infrastructure blueprints appeared first on The Ravello Blog.
