I got on the call this morning at 10:15 via mobile (lost track of time), and as I was on very noisy public transit, kept on mute. I listened to the problem of load balancers vs discrete objects (storage, CPU, networking). It seems to me that we may be missing a higher level object, which is the result of putting storage+CPU+network together. An assembly... we might call it a "machine" :-) To me, this suggests a solution to the load balancer vs network IP problem, and this comes in part from VHDL/Verilog space: the concept of hard and soft macros. Let's assume that we put together a machine machine = (storage w/OS-instance, CPU, network + some kind of autoconfiguration) let's say that we can call this thing a soft-macro. That is, a macro that you can see into from the API. You can duplicate these things at will and the auto-configuration pulls some info to autoconfigure things. (This is precisely what I do at SIMtone Hosted Services/CDU for virtual desktops) Now, let's call a specific instance of such a macro, "load-balancer". If I'm at cloud-provider A (a simple IaaS), I need to supply the "load-balancer" soft-macro for use, providing it with auto-configuration info. (To invoke meta-provisioning, my provisioning system uses a load balancer and static content built from Apache) If I'm at cloud-provider B (one like ElasticHosts, which provides load-balancer as a block), then I simply need to invoke the "load-balancer" hard-macro, providing it with similar auto-configuration info. -- ] Y'avait une poule de jammé dans l'muffler!!!!!!!!! | firewalls [ ] Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works, Ottawa, ON |net architect[ ] mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/ |device driver[ ] panic("Just another Debian GNU/Linux using, kernel hacking, security guy"); [