Pub/Sub in the cloud for IT Management
In the recent “Build” event, Microsoft introduced a new feature Windows Server 8 known as “Windows Powershell Web Access” for exposing a the server powershell console through a web interface. Although this feature looks very promising in first place, I only think it is convenient for intranet scenarios. I don’t initially see an organization exposing their servers directly to internet for using this feature from a phone as it represents a high risk.
As I discussed a time ago in this post “Pub/Sub in the cloud ..”, technologies like Windows Azure Service Bus, PubNub or Fanout (implemented in Node.JS) can act as intermediaries in the cloud for passing messages between clients and servers that are not publically addressable or can talk each other directly in the same network. All these technologies relies on outbound http connections for talking to the cloud, which are not typically blocked by firewalls.
What happens if you decide to extend this idea of passing messages from clients to servers to the IT Management world, and those messages actually represent actions you want to perform on your servers like restarting a web server or getting a list of active process. You would be able to control any of the servers in your organization from any device connected to the internet right ?. Do you think it’s too risky too ?. Ok, let’s add an additional layer on the cloud, which can act as firewall and control access about who can do what on the different servers. This additional layer on the cloud can also have a very nice HTML 5 visual interface that any IT guy in your organization can easily understand and use from any browser or device connected to the internet. At that point, you have everything you need to be in control of your servers from anywhere, even when you are driving back from work.
That’s the main idea of project where I have been working for the last few months in Tellago Studios and it was announced to the world today as Moesion.com. Take a look and subscribe to the beta program today, there will be a free personal edition that you could use for managing your servers.