Deploying RHQ Bundles To Non-Platform Resources

I recently completed the initial implementation of a feature that folks have been asking for lately, so I decided to put together a quick demo to show it.

First, some background. The initial RHQ Bundle Provisioning feature (of which I have blogged about in the past) supported the ability to deploy bundle distributions (which are, essentially, just files of generic content) to a group of platforms. That is, given a set of files bundled together, RHQ can ship out those files to a group of platform resources where the agents on those platforms will unbundle the files to the root file system.

This new feature (submitted as enhancement request BZ 644328) now allows you to target your bundle deployments to a group of non-platform resources if you wish. For example (as the demo shows), we can now target bundle deployments to JBossAS Server resources. This means you can bundle up a WAR or an EAR, and push that bundle to a group of JBoss AS Servers such that the WAR or EAR gets deployed directly to the deploy/ directory (and hence gets deployed into your application servers).

The demo is 10 minutes long and shows what a simple workflow looks like to deploy a WAR bundle to a group of JBoss EAP application servers.

View the demo here.

[Note: unlike my previous demos which were built on a Windows laptop using Wink and formatted as Flash, I decided to try Istanbul on my Fedora desktop. So the demo is formatted in .ogg format, as opposed to Flash. Hopefully, this doesn't limit the audience that is able to view the demo.]