Powerful IaaS Extensions Now Available
for Your Private Cloud

Organizations can now have the agility of the Amazon cloud in the comfort of their own data centers. MomentumSI Tough™ software solutions extend IaaS platforms, providing an important, necessary elastic service layer. Now, IaaS solutions like VMware’s vCloud Director, and Eucalyptus can intelligently auto scale, recover, monitor, provision, configure and balance as-a-service.

MomentumSI Tough cloud solutions are a framework of infrastructure and automation services that includes:

• Tough Cloud Provisioning – provisions multi-tiered applications using a declarative language
• Tough Instance Configuration – enables just-in-time software installation and run-time configuration via Chef or Puppet
• Tough Load Balancing – automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple machines
• Tough Cloud Monitoring – monitors the health of your cloud services across thousands of machines in multiple data centers or cloud providers
• Tough Auto Scaling – allows you to automatically acquire and release machines based on activity levels
• Tough DNS 53 – provides DNS functionality to the cloud exposed as an API enabling real-time changes

Together, the Tough services provide the automation features needed to create your own elastic services that are highly scalable and available. You can fully automate the management of applications running on your internal cloud to achieve high efficiency and fault tolerance while maintaining optimal performance. The automation and scalability of Tough services enable you to reduce operational overhead for managing your services.

Amazon Web Services Compatibility

• All services are interoperable with Amazon Web Services™ (AWS)
  • Tough Cloud Provisioning adheres to the AWS CloudFormation API
  • Tough Load Balancer adheres to the AWS Elastic Load Balancer API
  • Tough Cloud Monitor adheres to the AWS CloudWatch™ API
  • Tough Auto Scaler adheres to the AWS Auto Scaling API
  • Tough DNS 53 adheres to the AWS Route 53 API

• All services bind to popular IaaS providers
  • Current support for VMware vCloud™ Director and Eucalyptus
• Connect to your internal identity & access management system
• Can be used in your internal private cloud or an external hosting provider

Tough Cloud Provisioning Service

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Provisioning a single instance is easy, however, today’s applications are rarely a single image. The Tough Cloud Provisioning Service orchestrates the provisioning of multi-part applications according to a predetermined blueprint. This allows the application architects to create a digital description of the deployment architecture that they can pass on to the DevOps team. Entire applications can be provisioned with absolute precision by using a declarative language pioneered by Amazon and described in JSON format.

A single script can easily describe the launching of multiple images, the installation of software and the configuration (via the Tough Cloud Configuration Service). Additionally, the script can provision the other Tough services such as creating a new load balancer, monitoring an instance, identifying auto-scale characteristics and setting host names. The Tough Cloud Provisioning Service is API compatible with Amazon CloudFormation.

Tough Instance Configuration Service

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The Tough Instance Configuration Service enables a sysadmin or deployment architect to easily specify the configuration elements and allow them to be adjusted via a remote API calls. Common configuration issues that are addressed include: installing new software, applying patches, re-assigning IP addresses or host names, opening and closing network ports, backing up files, starting and stopping services, etc.

As applications scale and new servers are added, it is often necessary to send the same or similar commands to 10′s or hundreds of machines at once – and then verify that they received and acted on the orders. The Tough Instance Configuration Service leverages a durable publish and subscribe architecture to ensure that commands are properly distributed to the fleet, executed in order and provide guaranteed notification of faults. Use your choice of Chef or Puppet to develop configuration scripts. The Configuration Service provides a consistent API and connects seamlessly with the Provisioning Service.

Tough Load Balancing Service

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Designed specifically for private and hybrid clouds, Tough Load Balancer is a highly available solution for automatically distributing incoming application traffic across multiple machines. The “as-a-service” design allows users to create new instances of software-based load balancers with the click of a button. Changing the configuration of the balancer is just as easy – even if the system is dealing with cloud-based dynamic IP addresses.

The Tough Load Balancer allows you to achieve higher fault tolerance in your applications. When used in conjunction with the Tough Cloud Monitor, it is able to detect unhealthy instances and reroute traffic to healthy instances. You can enable cloud-based load balancing within your private cloud, across data centers, or across public cloud providers for maximum performance.

API compatibility with the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer allows you to use the most common cloud consoles and management suites to control your balancer. In addition, command line requests such as “CreateLoadBalancer” can be used for interactive control or embedded into scripts.

Tough Cloud Monitoring Service

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The Tough Cloud Monitoring is a scalable solution for monitoring the health of your cloud services. This design enables you to easily gather system information on virtual machines and core platform services. The services monitor virtual machines for network, CPU and memory usage levels. The monitor works across the most popular hypervisors including VMware, Xen and KVM. In addition to hypervisor monitoring, additional platform services such as Auto Scale and Load Balancer can be queried to obtain data on their current health.

Tough Cloud Monitoring is service-oriented and adheres to the Amazon CloudWatch™ standard from both a command line and WSDL perspective. All monitoring data is stored and aggregated for historical analysis and available in a secure Big Data database. This design enables an organization to monitor across thousands of machines in multiple data centers or cloud providers.

Tough Auto Scaling Service

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A core feature of cloud computing is the ability for a service to auto scale. This is achieved by first monitoring a running service (via Tough Cloud Monitor) and watching for thresholds in CPU or network to be exceeded. When a threshold is hit the Tough Auto Scaling Service triggers an event that adds an additional virtual server. Finally, the load to the original server can be balanced between the original machines and the newly provisioned server (via Tough Load Balancer).

Additionally, the auto scaling service can be used as an automated recovery mechanism. This is accomplished by setting the thresholds on the number of servers for an instance type to be “greater than 0 and less than 2”. With this policy, the auto scaling service is directed to ensure that one copy is running at all times. If the Cloud Monitor were to identify an outage, auto scale would create a replacement copy.

Tough Auto Scaling is a highly available service that adheres to the Amazon Auto Scaling standard from both a command line and WSDL perspective.

Tough DNS 53

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DNS 53 acts as the bridge between host names like ‘www.mydomain.com’ and the associated IP address ’192.168.0.9′. This service is a necessity in cloud environments where servers are rapidly provisioned and de-provisioned. With DNS 53, servers can keep consistent host names as they’re changed or moved.

The service allows authorized users (including the cloud fabric) to provision new instances of a DNS server as well as to control multiple DNS services that may span cloud zones & clusters. This includes the ability to manage IPV4 and IPV6 records (A & AAAA) as well as to manage CNAME, MX, NS and SPF records. The service is designed to wrap popular DNS implementations and has out-of-the-box support for BIND 9.

The solution is designed for use in the private cloud, allowing your organization to provide DNS capability “as-a-Service”. DNS 53 maintains full API compatibility with the Amazon Route 53 API.

Contact us today for more information about our Tough software solutions.

512-236-1517 (U.S.)
888-886-8560 (Toll Free)
Sales@MomentumSI.com