Blimpy

About

Notes and other bits are being stored in this public Evernote notebook.

The current concept/design document is captured in this note

The Blimpfile

Here's an example Blimpfile:

    Blimpy.fleet do |fleet|
        fleet.add do |ship|
            ship.image_id = 'ami-349b495d'
            ship.livery = 'rails'
            ship.group = 'Simple' # [Required] The name of the desired Security Group
            ship.region = 'us-west-1'
            ship.name = 'Rails App Server'
        end
    end

What is Livery?

In aviation, livery is the insignia or "look" an aircraft typically has. For example, Alaskan Airlines has a distinctive "creepy mountain man" livery on every plane.

With Blimpy, "livery" is a similar concept, a means of describing the "look" of a specific machine in the cloud. Currently the concept is still on the drawing board, but if you would imagine a tarball containing a bootstrap.sh script and Chef cookbooks or Puppet manifests to provision the entirety of the machine from start-to-finish.

When the machine comes online, the specified livery would be downloaded from S3 (for example) and bootstrap.sh would be invoked as root.