The Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator (CIAO) aims to provide an easy to deploy, secure, scalable cloud orchestration system which handles virtual machines, containers, and bare metal apps agnostically as generic workloads.

Overview

The Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator is a complicated piece of software. It introduces its own concepts, terminology and innovative architecture. For an overview of these concepts and how they all fit together, the reader is referred to the architecture document.

Getting started

The easiest way to get to know the Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator is to install and and play around with it. It comes with its own easy to setup development environment that allows you to run an entire cluster inside a single virtual machine. This virtual machine can be created and configured by issuing a single command. For more information see the The development environment.

Setting up a Cluster

Although the Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator development environment is convenient and easy to set up, to unlock the true potential of this project you’ll need to install it on a real cluster of machines. Installing on a real cluster is relatively painless and is performed using a custom tool called ciao-deploy. For more information see Deploying on a real cluster.

Using the Cluster

Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator clusters can be manipulated and inspected using the ciao command line tool. This tool can be used to build, deploy and manage cloud applications running on a cluster.

A tool called kubicle is also included that can be used to deploy a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster on top of an existing Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator cluster. It automatically creates workloads for the various k8s roles (master and worker), creates instances from these workloads which self-form into a k8s cluster, and extracts the configuration information needed to control the new cluster from the host machine.