Compute

The compute component of libcloud allows you to manage cloud and virtualservers offered by different providers, more than 20 in total.

In addition to managing the servers this component also allows you to rundeployment scripts on newly created servers. Deployment or “bootstrap” scriptsallow you to execute arbitrary shell commands. This functionality is usuallyused to prepare your freshly created server, install your SSH key, and run aconfiguration management tool (such as Puppet, Chef, or cfengine) on it.

Besides managing cloud and virtual servers, compute component also allows youto manage cloud block storage (not to be confused with cloud object storage)for providers which support it.Block storage management lives under compute API, because it is in most casestightly coupled with compute resources.

Terminology

Compute

  • Node - represents a cloud or virtual server.
  • NodeSize - represents node hardwareconfiguration. Usually this is amount of the available RAM, bandwidth,CPU speed and disk size. Most of the drivers also expose an hourly price(in dollars) for the Node of this size.
  • NodeImage - represents an operating systemimage.
  • NodeLocation - represents a physical locationwhere a server can be.
  • NodeState - represents a node state.Standard states are: running, rebooting, terminated, pending,stopped, suspended, paused, erro, unknown.

Key Pair Management

  • KeyPair - represents an SSH key pair object.

Block Storage

Supported Providers

For a list of supported providers see supported providers page.

Pricing

For majority of the compute providers Libcloud provides estimated pricinginformation which tells users how much it costs per hour to run a Nodewith a specific NodeSize.

For more information, please see the pricing page.

Deployment

Libcloud provides deployment functionality which makes bootstrapping a servereasier. It allows you to create a server and run shell commands on it once theserver has been created.

For more information and examples, please see the deployment page.

SSH key pair management

Compute API also allows you to manage your SSH key pairs.

For more information and examples, please see the key pair managementpage.

Examples

We have examples of several common patterns.

API Reference

For a full reference of all the classes and methods exposed by the computeAPI, see this page.