alphastaxllc / scalr

Cloud Management Software

Version: 5.8

What is Scalr?

Scalr is an open-source Cloud Management Platform (CMP). It leverages the APIs exposed by compatible Cloud Platforms (including AWS, GCE, OpenStack, CloudStack, and more) to provide users with a high-level and productive interface to their organization's cloud resources.

Mission Statement

Multi-Cloud Support

Scalr provides a single UI, API, and CLI to access resources across any Cloud Platform, public or private.

Scalr strives to expose a common set of features across all clouds, but does not limit its users to a dumbed-down feature set (e.g. IAM Instance Profiles are available through Scalr for AWS, even if they have no equivalent in other clouds).

High-Level Declarative Primitives rather than Low-Level Imperative Instructions

Unlike a Cloud Platform's UI or API, Scalr intentionally does not expose the ability to imperatively provision resources (e.g. there is no API call to "provision an instance" in Scalr).

Instead, Scalr enables its end-users to declare the infrastructure they'd like to deploy through high-level primitives such as Farms, Roles, and Farm Roles ("I'd like this application tier to be deployed in this cloud across 8 to 12 hosts, each with one data volume"). In turn, Scalr maintains that state by making the appropriate imperative API calls to the underlying Cloud Platforms that the user selected (e.g. AWS, OpenStack, ...).

When unexpected conditions arise (e.g. a server crashes or is accidentally terminated), Scalr automatically reconciles the resulting infrastructure with the specification that was declared by the user (e.g. by provisioning and configuring a replacement instance).

We believe (and so do Scalr users) that this encourages end-users to adopt cloud architecture best practices that work at scale ("cloud-native") — i.e. not to reason about individual resources, but about the overall desired state of their infrastructure (a design practice epitomized by the "cattle, not pets" motto).

Usable by Both Developers and IT

Scalr strives to reconcile the needs of both Developers and IT.

At a high-level, developers need self-service, and IT needs control. While the two might seem incompatible they usually aren't: developers don't mind complying with IT policies; provided that doesn't slow them down.

To that end, Scalr seeks to provide IT with the ability to prepare and automatically enforce policies that ensure that every piece of infrastructure that developers provision is made compliant with the organization's policies, without requiring additional effort on the part of developers.

Using Scalr, this is be achieved through the enforcement of specific cloud configurations (e.g. VPC, with Governance), the definition of user-level restrictions (Role-Based Access Control), the execution of host-level compliance scripts (Global Orchestration), and integration with external systems (Webhooks and API).

More Information

Learn more about Scalr on the Scalr Website.

Installation Instructions

Installation instructions for Scalr can be found on the Scalr Wiki.

Instructions to upgrade from an earlier Scalr version can be found there too.

-- The Scalr Team

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In memory of Alexey Kovalyov. Brilliant engineer, caring brother, and most excellent friend. This project is dedicated to you.