Canonical's Landscape: Manage Your Clouds, Even on Amazon EC2
by Kristin Shoemaker - May. 17, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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Sometimes all-in-one gets a bad wrap. Think about it. They've seen some major improvements over the years but there are still many all-in-one printing/scanning/copying peripherals on the market that don't do any of those tasks particularly well. Outside of technology, think of department stores. Driving out small businesses is a downside, and yet, they're still so annoyingly convenient.
There are times when a streamlined, all-in-one approach to a job is a huge advantage, making simple tasks easier to complete, reducing the chances of error, and taking the stress out of day to day processes, whether they're routine or brand new. Take server management, for instance. Systems administrators have the somewhat unenviable task of shepherding servers (both physical and virtual), watching over the daemons and services they run, with their flock located down the hall, across town, across the country, or any combination thereof.
One of the ideas driving Canonical's Landscape software is to ease, and minimize the risks involved in routine tasks that systems administrators face when managing multiple Ubuntu-powered servers. Landscape not only allows administrators to monitor all in-house server instances through its interface, but also enables them to keep tabs and manage Ubuntu servers deployed on Amazon's EC2 cloud environment.
Administrators access Landscape 1.3 through its web interface, where they are able to register, update and manage software packages on both physical and virtual servers (and desktops) on the network by pointing and clicking. Monitoring tools and logs make it easier to spot potential problems and slow-downs before they happen, and improvements have been made to the custom graphing feature, allowing users to archive trends of specific system parameters, and create scripts to visually plot those parameters along with the usual machine parameters, such as CPU and disk usage.
Remote monitoring tools and access to machines have always been a necessary part of systems administration, but as servers scale upwards and cloud computing becomes increasingly common, an all-in-one utility that helps recognize, resolve and prevent issues will minimize the risk of truly catastrophic failures and undoubtedly save the sanity of many sys admins.
Landscape highlights Canonical's continuing efforts to demonstrate Ubuntu's functionality beyond the desktop, as well as complements the focus on cloud computing slated for the October Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) release.
