Recorded November 12th, 2011, third in a series of conversations from Clojure Conj 2011.
I caught up with Hugo Duncan and Antoni Batchelli (everyone calls him Toni 😉 during one of the lunch breaks at the Conj. These guys have been on a tear with Pallet, an open source Clojure project that Hugo started in early 2010 to shave one of the hairiest yaks around, the automation of provisioning and management of computing infrastructure. The result is a tool and library that provides a classically Clojure abstraction for controlling nearly any environment, from cloud nodes to virtual machines to the rackmounts you have downstairs. Since it is their full-time job — Toni and Hugo have built a business around the project — most of our discussion centers on Pallet, its history, and how people are using it.
Near the end, Hugo and I talk some about his other work in the Clojure world, which has generally been related to tooling around Emacs and Maven.
Enjoy!
Listen:
Or, download the mp3 directly.
Discrete Topics
- Clojure/West, happening March 16-17, 2012 — be there!
- Disclojure, a great stream of links to Clojure tutorials and news maintained by Toni
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Pallet, representing computing infrastructure with Clojure abstractions
- Chas has used pallet to automate provisioning and configuration of Clojure webapps and CouchDB clusters (old, OLD links!)
- Often mentioned in the same breath as Chef and Puppet on the now-defunct IT Management and Cloud Podcast (by Michael Cote and John M. Willis)
- Storm, by Nathan Marz Twitter — uses pallet to simplify deployment and operations
- pallet-hadoop — uses pallet as a library to automate hadoop operations
- Support for tons of different computing infrastructures:
- GoGrid (using Clojure because of Pallet!)
- swank-clojure
- JPDA (Java Platform Debug Architecture), includes the Java Debug Interface
- Clojure Debug Toolkit
- Alternative Maven support for Clojure, written in Clojure: zi
- clojure-maven-plugin (by a.k.a. talios)
- Leiningen
Outro
This episode’s outro is a piece by Christopher Ford. Using a synthesized cornet by Jennifer Smith, he produced an abbreviated version of a piece where a set of chords continually fall out of time with a simple five-note melody. Of course, full source to the piece is available for your Overtone hacking delight.