What's the difference between a dedicated server and a 'cloud' instance? One's a UNIX machine with ssh, and the other's a different UNIX machine with ssh. Shanghai offers a standard API for bringing servers into your service, and hardening them to the duty. Service Guarantees Citizenship.
The future of the cloud is in the basement.
When you sign up with a hosting provider, eventually you are given a snippet of text containing the superuser login information. Typically these are still sent over email, but you might find this text in a web console or on a mobile app. Shanghai takes over from there; use the API or send a PGP-encrypted email to the service, it will extract the login information from the semi-structured input, log in for you, install your public key, change the root password, run your perferred hardening scripts, and then tell you it is ready.
This allows you to 'provision' any machine, without caring if it is virtual or real.
- redis
- rubinius, jruby, or ruby 1.9+
- openssl
- a plausibly-configured mail transfer agent
- a network config that allows 'impressed' machines to make a callback