Lobster is a simple hourly billing panel for virtual machine services. Lobster does not manage virtual machines directly -- instead, it relies on backends that it communicates with through VM interfaces; several backends are supported.
See https://github.com/LunaNode/lobster/wiki/GettingStarted to get started.
Lobster allows multiple regions to be defined. Each region has a separate virtual machine interface, although the interface type may be the same. Plans are shared across regions, but images are not.
Lobster currently only supports a prepaid hourly billing model. Users pay via some payment interface, and once payment is recorded as completed, credit is added to their account. If a user is running out of credit, Lobster will send low credit notifications; once credit reaches zero, services are suspended, and eventually the account is terminated.
There are three services billed by Lobster:
Different backends have different features, but Lobster tries to support as much as possible. Currently these backends are supported:
These provider-specific APIs are also supported:
Lobster also supports using Cloug [1] providers as VM backends. Cloug is a cloud API library that provides a common interface to access multiple APIs, just as Lobster provides a common panel. Cloug is still under development, but the aim is to eventually move all VM interface code on Lobster to Cloug.
[1] https://github.com/LunaNode/cloug
Payment is generally accepted via a pay-callback system, where we direct the user to a payment gateway and then wait for a secure callback notification from the gateway that confirms payment.
Supported payment gateways:
The Lobster project uses Github for coordination.
URL: https://github.com/LunaNode/lobster
Note that per the Apache license, any contribution you submit for inclusion in Lobster shall be under the terms of the Apache license. See Section 5 of the Apache License Version 2.0 for details.