Evaluating vCloud Director API tools

In order to evaluate the different tools available for interacting with the +Skyscape Cloud Services / vCloud Director API, I am setting myself the following challenge - To fully automate the creation of a simple Web Application:

• The website should be hosted inside a vDC on the Skyscape Cloud Services infrastructure.
• It will have 2 web servers behind a load-balancer.
• The web servers will be backed by a single database server.
• The vDC should have a separate jump-box server accessible via SSH to provide remote access to other servers in the vDC.

Over the next series of posts I shall review a number of options for representing this simple Web Application using Infrastructure-as-Code tools. Any scripts generated as part of the evaluations will be shared on Github for you to download and try out for yourself.

These are some of the tools I shall be taking a look at. It is not exhaustive, so if there are others you think are worth reviewing, please add a comment.

• +Chef's Chef Provisioning tool,
• +Government Digital Service's vcloud-tools toolset,
• +Ansible's new integration with vCloud Director.