Build your own cloud with antMan Workers

Discover the advantages and disadvantages of turning a bare metal system into the core of an antMan cloud and whether the free Community Edition and its limitations will work in your case.

- Martin Loschwitz

Building a private cloud is time consuming and complex. Some use OpenStack, but many OpenStack projects fail because companies underestimate its complexity. antMan does not rely on OpenStack – or any of the other major open source applications for private clouds – but brews its own potion. The tool claims that you just need to install antMan on one or more systems. The rest of the setup is then easy, and the process is largely automated.

Ants Everywhere

Before I get started, a brief clarification of the terms used in the context of antMan will be useful. For the most part, they are contrived and have something to do with ants. The likelihood of knowing the technical terms used here is pretty low if you have never used antMan before. antMan is not, strictly speaking, the name of the Linux distribution on which the product is based. Rather, it is the entire product and the software for managing the physical nodes, which is the core of the product, so to speak. As described here, a Linux distribution named edgeLinux [1] is specially adapted to the needs of this setup. The antHill is the vendor’s central registration page, where each newly installed antMan instance is registered with a separate product key. antMan also distinguishes between antsles and