Colama can treat your Virtual Appliance as version controlled Entity

It is possible to version control your Virtual Appliance, similar to any Document, software code, using Colama

Recently I was working on a task of building a Virtual Appliance for my software application. I had to add many missing packages in Guest OS, make modifications to the application. Every Modification in the application, every addition/deletion of packages forced me to rebuild the Appliance.

Was wondering – why can’t I have system similar to Subversion/CVS – which version controls Software Code. The answer is – YES, the Colama developed by Coriolis can actually help you version control your Appliances.

Virtualization has actually converted our servers to structured data. Virtual machines are a new form of data, which must be managed by the enterprise. Like other types of data e.g. documents and source code, it has its own life cycle, being created (perhaps from a similar version), modified to suit requirements, revision controlled and tagged with metadata to checkpoint critical stages in its evolution, its contents indexed so as to be searchable, backed up, deployed, and finally, destroyed.

I got the chance to explore/use Colama – my observations are as follows:

Colama, a next-generation, vendor-neutral Virtual Machine Warehousing software with following change management related features:

• Virtual Machine change Management (similar to svn/cvs for source code)
• Cloning/snapshots (similar to Ghost images)
• Search, based on virtual machine image contents (this is one of the USPs of Colama)

There are other powerful features of Colama. These include:

• Web based collaborative user interface (virtual machine grouping/categorization) along with strict access control (ACL)
• Virtual machine asset management (Discovery, Cataloging, Repository, Revision control, Image inspection, Search)
• Automation ( Provisioning, Unattended installation, Patch Application, End to end QA automation)
• Storage Optimization ( 70-80% reduction in Storage Requirement) using de-duplication
• Policy Management (License compliance, Provisioning Policies)

Coriolis is targeting QA groups, IT administrators of the enterprises and training institutes for Colama’s Users. Even the Colama can be useful for the companies who deliver applications bundled inside Virtual Appliances.

"Collective Intelligence in Action" would provide you a great foundation for developing Enterprise Class Application

Have you ever surprised to see line similar to "Hello, Sopan. We have recommendations for you" at the top
when you login into the Amazon.com site. Yes, this kind of functionality is very easy to
implement into your application after reading Satnam's "Collective Intelligence in Action"

Have you ever wonder how Netflix is able to recommend movies, what are the latest trends
in the making search more intelligent or how you can intelligently gather new content and
present it to your application?

In this book, Santnam does an excellent job providing the answers to all these questions
The book covers the wide breadth of the topics with amazing focus and detail-architecture
for adding intelligence, tagging and tag clouds, content aggregation through focused web
crawling and from the blogospare, leveraging machine learning techniques such as clustering
and predictive modeling, intelligent search and building recommendation engine.

I particularly like the approach to explain the mathematical concepts with simple examples,
followed by implementing it in simple Java and then leveraging open-source software.

This book can be useful if you are interested in integrating different Open Source Software
to deliver Enterprise Class Application.

I also liked the authors style of providing summary at the end of each chapter.
He also provides huge set of very useful resources for reading further on the topics
covered into the chapters.



You must pickup this book if you are

• serious (developer/manager/architect type of Eng) on adding search or intelligent/smartness into your Application
• person involved in developing (programmer, tester, manager) Social Networking Application
• involved in managing "Knowledge Management Infrastructure" of any size organization

This Book will provide you a great foundation for developing Enterprise Class
Features.

I highly recommend it.