Reconstructable Software Appliances with Kameleon

A software appliance builder bundles together an application with its needed middleware and an operating system to allow easy deployment on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. These builders have the potential to address a key need in our community: the ability to reproduce an experiment. This paper reports the experiences on developing a software appliance builder called Kameleon that leverages popular and well tested tools. Kameleon simplifies the creation of complex software appliances that are targeted at research on operating systems, HPC and distributed computing. It does so by proposing a highly modular description format that encourages collaboration and reuse of procedures. Moreover, it provides debugging mechanisms for improving experimenter's productivity. To justify that our appliance builder stands above others, we compare it with the most known tools used by developers and researchers to automate the construction of software environments for virtual machines and IaaS infrastructures.