VGCN: Rolling Replacement of Cloud Compute Resources

We have been experimentally running some Galaxy jobs in the bwCloud at the University of Freiburg. Unlike more traditional compute resources we can scale the cloud resources up and down on-demand.

But what happens when we need to replace the VMs? We built a new version of our compute node images but we didn't want to disrupt jobs that were running.

So we spent some time developing a small tool to gracefully terminate the VMs running the old image and replace them with VMs running the new image.

The software is freely available under the GPL license