Fog is a Ruby gem which you can grab with “gem install fog“.
Its a Cloud services Library which will allow you to communicate with multiple cloud vendor platforms. Its the Fog Ruby library that Opscode Chef recipes Knife uses to allow it to integrate with the differing cloud platforms and push your recipes to your new cloud instances.
Whilst my preference would be to use the Opscode platform along with Knife (as it incorporates all of the features Fog offers and lots more), Fog can be used on its own without Chef/Knife, as follows (example source http://rubydoc.info/gems/fog/0.5.1/frames) :
>> server = AWS.servers.create
ArgumentError: image_id is required for this operation
>> server = AWS.servers.create(:image_id => 'ami-5ee70037')
<Fog::AWS::EC2::Server [...]>
>> server.destroy # cleanup after yourself or regret it, trust me
true
I would recommend taking a look here for more info:http://rubydoc.info/gems/fog/0.5.1/frames, as it helps you to see how Fog works, what happens behind the scenes and other things you can do with Fog.
About Matt Palmer
Matthew Palmer, based in Ashford,Kent has over 15 years experience in Linux and UNIX server configuration. Including building the physical servers, system installation and configuration/development of services, and good experience with Shell scripting,Perl,PHP,Apache (LAMP) and a bit of C.
Matt Palmer also has good working experience with design and implementation of Virtualisation frameworks, including VMware ESX/ESXi,Xen and more recently been instrumental in the design and implemention of a new Cloud infrastructure to support a booking API on Amazons AWS EC2 platform, using the api-tools and the Opscode platform to create recipes to make the framework quickly reproduceable and more scalable.
Matt Palmer also has projects live on sourceforge, take a look here http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpevarss and here http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysqlcapicheck, as I’m looking for volunteers on the project to help make it better
Matthew Palmer also has a long history helping in (and is a Graduate) in the HP support forums, take a look here: http://forums.itrc.hp.com, and a keen advocate of GreenIT.
