Preview: Application Centric Deployment (ACD)

Not part of the orcharhino 5.5 release itself, but we spent a lot of time working on another way to deploy whole applications: application centric deployment (ACD). Currently, orcharhino is host centric, i.e. you deploy a host and then configure the host using Ansible, Puppet, or Salt. With ACD, we go one step further and leave the host-centric approach behind.

Modern applications are usually distributed on several servers. Take a web application, for example: it requires a database, a web server, an application server like JBOSS, and a web proxy that distributes the requests to the web servers. Until now, four hosts had to be individually deployed and configured with orcharhino. With ACD, we want to look at the application in its entirety: deploying and configuring four hosts with an Ansible Playbook – so that at the end, a coherent web application is created. The configuration is done in a way that the web proxy already knows its web servers and can forward the requests; the web servers already have a connection to the application server; and the application server has already integrated the database server – everything is already coordinated.

While we were working on 5.5, we also laid the foundation of ACD. Application Centric Deployment will be available to our customers with the release of orcharhino 5.6. Until then, you can already have a look at screenshots of ACD.

We welcome your feedback regarding potential use cases you envision in your organization