Welcome to the SmartFrog project landing page. Here you can find information regarding the SmartFrog framework for configuration, deployment and management of distributed systems.
History
SmartFrog was originally developed by HP Labs Bristol and later open-sourced. It is of the earliest examples of a declarative configuration language and runtime. For more details you can see the following resources:
- Anderson, P., Herry, H (2016). A Formal Semantics for the SmartFrog Configuration Language. Journal of Network and Systems Management 24, 309–345. doi:10.1007/s10922-015-9351-y.
- Goldsack, Patrick; Guijarro, Julio; Loughran, Steve; Coles, Alistair; Farrell, Andrew; Lain, Antonio; Murray, Paul; Toft, Peter (2009). “The Smart Frog configuration management framework”. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 43: 16–25. doi:10.1145/1496909.1496915.
- Patrick Goldsack, Paul Murray, Andrew Farrell, Peter Toft (2008). SmartFrog and Data Centre Automation (HPL-2008-35). HP Labs. https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2008/HPL-2008-35.pdf
- Gréhant X., Pernet O., Jarp S., Demeure I., Toft P. (2008). Xen Management with SmartFrog. In: Bougé L. et al. (eds) Euro-Par 2007 Workshops: Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4854. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78474-6_25
- Steve Loughran & Julio Guijarro (2007). Farms, Fabrics and Clouds. HP Labs. http://people.apache.org/~stevel/slides/farms_fabrics_and_clouds.pdf.
- Steve Loughran & Julio Guijarro (2006). Distributed Testing with SmartFrog. Google London Test Automation Conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKshZGUWHJ4.
- Steve Loughran & Julio Guijarro (2005). Taming Deployment with SmartFrog. HP Labs. https://www.hpl.hp.com/breweb/smartfrog/presentations/Taming_deployment_with_SmartFrog.pdf.
- Goldsack, Patrick; Guijarro, Julio; Lain, Antonio; Mecheneau, Guillaume; Murray, Paul; Toft, Peter (2003). “SmartFrog: Configuration and Automatic Ignition of Distributed Applications”: 1–9. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.187.8478.
- Anderson, P., Goldsack, P. and Paterson, J. (2003). SmartFrog Meets LCFG: Autonomous Reconfiguration with Central Policy Control. In LISA (Vol. 3, pp. 213-222). https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa03/tech/full_papers/anderson/anderson_html/
- Anderson, P., Beckett, G., Kavoussanakis, K., Mecheneau, G., Paterson, J. and Toft, P. (2003). large-scale system configuration with LCFG and SmartFrog. Technical report, The GridWeaver Project. 10.1.1.397.6064
For a more general introduction to the benefits of declarative configuration management, see Paul Anderson’s 2017 “Composition and Inheritance in Declarative Configuration Languages” talk at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. In his talk Paul details the history of configuration management and SmartFrog’s role within it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXo7DtFx-jM.
Following Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s closure of its Security and Cloud Lab in Bristol during 2017, the company’s ongoing support and development of the project was withdrawn.
The project’s source code is available on SourceForge.
Future
In 2018 Patrick Goldsack, one of SmartFrog’s lead authors, co-founded Configured Things a startup specialising in systems that enable Smart Cities and the federated Internet of Things. Configured Things are actively developing the next version of SmartFrog, SFJS, built on Node.js with configuration descriptors written in a JSON dialect. To find out more details, you can visit their project page.