Catalyst, the New Zealand based global open source company, continues to innovate in the cloud by introducing a market leading cloud orchestration service in Catalyst Cloud.

Cloud orchestration fully automates cloud usage. It allows you to deploy applications and infrastructure using a simple template language that describes the required resources and their relationship.

The orchestration service, called Heat, manages the life-cycle of application stacks on your behalf. When a template is modified, the service orchestrates the required changes to the infrastructure in the appropriate order. Templates can be managed like code and versioned in your source control system.

The orchestration service can be integrated with configuration management systems to provision and manage software. It can run Puppet or Chef in standalone mode, or be used to present compute instances back to the Puppet/Chef master for software configuration.

The service is currently in beta and available via the APIs and command line tools. It will soon be exposed via the web dashboard as well (the following image shows a preview of the orchestration dashboard).

Supported features include:

• Create, manage and delete application stacks.
• Validate stack templates.
• Show list of resources belonging to a stack.

There are no additional charges for the use of the cloud orchestration service. Clients only pay for the resources consumed by their running application stacks (such as compute, network and storage).

More information on how to use the cloud orchestration service can be found at http://docs.catalystcloud.io/cloud-orchestration.html.

This is the first Platform as a Service (PaaS) component on Catalyst Cloud and and a very important step in the roadmap for 2015. Following cloud orchestration, Catalyst have Message Queue as a Service, Database as a Service and ultimately application life-cycle management lined up. These platform services are being built on top of the already established and flexible IaaS building blocks.

Catalyst Cloud is a flexible and powerful New Zealand based platform that enables organisations to innovate quickly, while increasing efficiency levels and retaining data sovereignty. With a pay-as-you-go model, it requires no upfront investments or long-term commitments and offers extremely competitive hourly rates.