Quilt

Quilt is a simple way to use JavaScript to build and manage anything from website backends to complex distributed systems. As shown above, a few simple commands will get your system up and running.

Building infrastructure and running applications with Quilt is simple, intuitive, and flexible. With Quilt.js, you specify your infrastructure declaratively in JavaScript, and Quilt then takes care of deploying it on one or more cloud providers. Subsequently scaling and modifying the infrastructure then becomes a matter of simply changing a few lines of JavaScript code.

The Quilt.js JavaScript framework allows for development, versioning, and testing of infrastructure in the same way we do for application code. Additionally, Quilt.js code is shareable, reusable and composable, making it easy to set up and manage systems without being an expert in system administration.

Quilt is a research project out of UC Berkeley. It is currently under heavy development, but please try it out - we are eager for feedback!

Example: Deploying a MEAN Stack App with Quilt

The MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js) is a popular fullstack JavaScript framework used for web development. Deploying a flexible, multi-node MEAN stack app can be both time consuming and costly, but Quilt simplifies this process.

With Quilt, it takes fewer than 20 lines of JavaScript code to set up a replicated Node.js application, connect it to MongoDB, and hook it up with a web proxy:

    var Node = require("github.com/NetSys/quilt/specs/node/node");
    var HaProxy = require("github.com/quilt/haproxy").Haproxy;
    var Mongo = require("github.com/quilt/mongo");

    // Create 3 replicated instances of each service.
    var mongo = new Mongo(3);
    // `app` is a Node.js application using Express, AngluarJS, and MongoDB.
    var app = new Node({
      nWorker: 3,
      image: "quilt/mean-service",
      env: {
        PORT: "80",
        MONGO_URI: mongo.uri("mean-example")
      }
    });
    var haproxy = new HaProxy(3, app.services());

    // Connect the app and database.
    mongo.connect(27017, app);
    app.connect(27017, mongo);
    // Make the proxy accessible from the public internet on port 80.
    haproxy.public();

The application is infrastructure agnostic, so it can be deployed on any - and possibly many - of the Quilt supported cloud providers. Here, we specify a possible multi-node setup on AWS:

    var namespace = createDeployment({
        adminACL: ["local"],
    });

    // An AWS VM with 1-2 CPUs and 1-2 GiB RAM.
    // The Github user `ejj` can ssh into the VMs.
    var baseMachine = new Machine({
        provider: "Amazon",
        cpu: new Range(2),
        ram: new Range(2),
        sshKeys: githubKeys("ejj"),
    });

    // Boot VMs with the properties of `baseMachine`.
    namespace.deploy(baseMachine.asMaster());
    namespace.deploy(baseMachine.asWorker().replicate(3));

All that is left is to deploy the application on the specified infrastructure:

    namespace.deploy(app);
    namespace.deploy(mongo);
    namespace.deploy(haproxy);

This spec can be found in specs/mean/example.js and used to deploy your app. Check out this guide for step by step instructions on how to deploy your own application using Quilt.

As shown in the very beginning, deploying a MEAN app with Quilt is now as simple as running the command quilt run specs/mean/example.js.

Features

Quilt offers a lot of great features. These are some of them:

Build infrastructure in JavaScript
Simple deployment and management of applications
Easy cross-cloud deployment
Low cost
Shareable and composable infrastructure code
Intuitive networking
Flexible and scalable infrastructure

There are more to come in the near future!

Install

Install and Set Up Go

Install Go with your package manager or by following the directions on Go's website.

Setup your GOPATH and PATH environment variables in your ~/.bashrc file. E.g.:

export GOPATH='~/gowork'
export PATH='$PATH:$GOPATH/bin'

Download Quilt

Download and install Quilt and its dependencies using go get

go get github.com/NetSys/quilt