Ironfan-Homebase: Master Plans for a Scalable Architecture

Ironfan, the foundation of the Infochimps Platform, is an expressive toolset for constructing scalable, resilient architectures. It works in the cloud, in the data center, and on your laptop, and it makes your system diagram visible and inevitable. Inevitable systems coordinate automatically to interconnect, removing the hassle of manual configuration of connection points (and the associated danger of human error). For more information about Ironfan and the Infochimps Platform, visit infochimps.com.

The Ironfan Homebase repository is the central home for orchestrating your architecture. It unifies:

• Cookbooks, roles, and environments
• Cluster descriptions
• Your Chef and cloud credentials
• Pantries (collections of cookbooks, roles and so forth)

Getting Started

To jump right into using Ironfan, follow our Installation Instructions. For an explanatory tour, check out our Web Walkthrough. Please file all issues on Ironfan Issues.

Index

ironfan-homebase works together with the full Ironfan toolset:

Tools:

• ironfan-homebase: Centralizes the cookbooks, roles and clusters. A solid foundation for any Chef user.
• ironfan gem: The core Ironfan models, and Knife plugins to orchestrate machines and coordinate truth among your homebase, cloud and chef server.
• ironfan-pantry: Our collection of industrial-strength, cloud-ready recipes for Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Zabbix and more.
• silverware cookbook: Helps you coordinate discovery of services ("list all the machines for awesome_webapp, that I might load balance them") and aspects ("list all components that write logs, that I might logrotate them, or that I might monitor the free space on their volumes"). Found within the ironfan-pantry.

Documentation:

• index of wiki pages
• ironfan wiki: High-level documentation and install instructions.
• ironfan issues: Bugs or questions and feature requests for any part of the Ironfan toolset.
• ironfan gem docs: Rdoc docs for Ironfan.
• Ironfan Screen Cast-- build a Hadoop cluster from scratch in 20 minutes.

Note: Ironfan is not compatible with Ruby 1.8. All versions later than 1.9.2-p136 should work fine.