Apparatus and methods for automatically reflecting changes to a computing solution in an image for the computing solution
A pluggable cloud enablement boot device (PCEBD) is a bootable device that includes all information needed to automatically provision hardware and software to create a computing solution that meets customer requirements. This allows for quickly deploying a computing solution in a manner that eliminates many manual steps that are typically performed today. The PCEBD uses firmware to verify a given platform has sufficient resources to deploy the PCEBD. The computing solution, once provisioned and running, can be modified, and these modifications may be reflected in the definition of the PCEBD. In addition, a computing solution may include multiple resources provisioned from multiple PCEBDs, which can be packaged into a PCEBD that will include other PCEBDs. The result is a way to deploy computing solutions that is much more efficient than the manual methods used in the prior art.
1. An apparatus comprising:
at least one processor;
a boot device coupled to the at least one processor, the boot device comprising a computer readable non-transitory storage that includes a boot image that comprises:
boot code executed by the at least one processor that initializes the apparatus;
requirements for a computing solution that include at least one software application and business logic;
a system verification and integration mechanism that compares available hardware and software with the requirements for the computing solution and determines computing resources from the available hardware and software that meet the requirements for the computing solution; and
a building and integration mechanism that automatically provisions the computing resources with the at least one software application and the business logic without intervention of a human user to provide the computing solution, detects changes made to the computing solution after the building and integration mechanism automatically provisions the computing resources, and reflects the changes made to the computing solution in the boot image.
2. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the requirements for the computing solution comprise hardware requirements, software requirements, networking requirements and security requirements.
3. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the computing solution comprises a cloud computing solution and the building and integration mechanism provisions the computing resources in at least one cloud.
4. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the system verification and integration mechanism determines the available hardware and software by querying firmware in the apparatus.
5. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the changes to the computing solution detected by the building and integration mechanism comprise changes from a second boot image.
6. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the building and integration mechanism determines when additional hardware resources are available and allocates the additional hardware resources to the computing solution.
7. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the system verification and integration mechanism creates a disk partition and installs a file system in the disk partition.
8. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the boot device comprises at least one image of at least one other boot device.