When progressing from small experimental environments to a more extensive use of the cloud infrastructure, it is often required to automate the provisioning and life cycle of complex applications comprising multiple resources -- such as multi-tier applications with several inter-dependent Virtual Machines, each running a particular software stack and configured to interact with the other Virtual Machines. FIWARE Cloud provides advanced capabilities to manage application blueprints, comprising one or more application tiers. Each tier may consist of an elastic group of Virtual Machine instances, with auto-scaling rules (enforced by the Policy Manager GE) that determine when Virtual Machines will be added or removed to/from the group, typically based on the load on the corresponding tier (monitored via a dedicated instrumentation provided by the Monitoring GE). Moreover, each tier can define the software packages that should be configured within the guest Operating System as part of the Virtual Machine instance provisioning. The software packages and their configuration are managed by the Software Deployment and Configuration GE, which is based on (and compatible with) Opscode Chef -- a widely used open source software configuration management tool. The combination of these GEs, surfaced in a holistic manner via thePaaS Management GE (and available in the FIWARE Cloud Portal), provides unique value proposition currently not available in other OpenStack-based clouds. It is worth noticing that the FIWARE team is working with the OpenStack community to contribute the necessary enhancements to make our technology broadly available.

More details on working with blueprints (via the FIWARE Cloud Portal) can be found at  http://edu.fi-ware.org/course/view.php?id=47 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdZS_0jt6Vo