AMP 5 is here
Cloudsoft AMP 5.0 is here, surfacing more high-level information on how applications are running, plus adding new policies and new features for managing huge numbers of applications, complex blueprint sets, and customizing the UI.
Cloudsoft AMP and Apache Brooklyn have long kept a rich model of systems: in the AMP 5 series, we're making it easier to get a distilled views of this information and to blueprint with common patterns.
New Application Dashboard
The headline feature in 5.0 is the new Application Dashboard, showing resource usage, policy activity, license info and more summary information on each application:
You might also notice in the "Inventory Manager" application row of the dashboard, it shows highlights of primary/failover activity: this uses a new ElectPrimary policy added to AMP based on field experience handling a wide range of HA/DR scenarios. You'll also find time-of-day policies and improvements to many of the policies and enrichers.
Greater Visibility of Automated Management
For drill-down detail into applications, a new "Management" tab shows highlights and detailed activity specific to a policy, enricher, or feed, making it clearer what management is taking place:
Developer Productivity Enhancements
In addition to surfacing internals such as these, AMP 5.0 introduces new developer productivity capabilities around "bundles": you can now easily group related blueprints, scripts, config, icons, and other files into ZIP archives (or OSGi bundles, for those familiar with this bundling and resource loading mechanism). These can be versioned together and managed as a unit. From the command line, a br catalog add . will ZIP up a local folder, including all resource files, and install items listed in a catalog.bom file at the root. To access a script or blueprint within this BOM, simply refer to it as classpath:/path/in/folder/file.sh. This makes command-line workflows and devops integrations much smoother, and lets blueprint developers work in a more modular way, but as usual, it's entirely optional, and if you're used to adding individual BOMs or using the composer, you'll find that all still works as before.
AMP Cluster & UI Customizability Now GA
For AMP operators, two new features that were early access in 4.8 have been made GA. These are AMP Cluster, where multiple AMP workers can collaborate to handle many thousands of applications behind an elastic sharding API, and UI Customizability, where you can define skins for AMP to reflect your organization or even take AMP's UI widgets and embed those in your own portal applications.
The 5.x Series
Throughout the AMP 5.x series we'll be improving the application operations capabilities, from dashboards through to policies, and beefing up the library of blueprints for common cloud services such as DNS and cloud DBs, so stay tuned, and if there are any features you're eager to see, let us know.
Want to Know More?
For more information please see Release Notes and Upgrade Guidance. Also, don't forget AMP 5.0 is available to download for trial now from Cloudsoft.io.
Coming Soon: AMP 5.0 in the AWS Marketplace.