| ## What is Brooklyn? |
| |
| **brooklyn** is a library that simplifies application deployment and management. |
| |
| For **deployment**, it is designed to tie in with other tools, |
| giving single-click deploy and adding the concepts of |
| manageable clusters and fabrics: |
| |
| * many common software entities available out-of-the-box |
| * integrates with [Apache Whirr](http://whirr.apache.org) |
| to deploy well-known services such as Hadoop and elasticsearch |
| (or use POBS, plain-old-bash-scripts) |
| * use PaaS's such as OpenShift, alongside self-built clusters, for maximum flexibility |
| |
| Brooklyn makes roll-out an integral part of the DevOps chain, |
| as code which can be version-controlled and programmatically tested, |
| and portable across many clouds or fixed IP machines, |
| using [jclouds](http://jclouds.org) -- |
| or just hitting ``localhost`` for quick dev/test. |
| |
| Brooklyn's main emphasis is post-deployment, **managing** an application once it is live: |
| management policies are an integral part of the deployment descriptor, |
| and at runtime policies have access to all aspects of the deployment. |
| They are aware of the deployment topology (hierarchical) and |
| locations (machines, PaaSes, and jurisdictions), |
| as well as scripts, instrumentation, and operational goals and constraints. |
| This means they're all set, once the application is launched, |
| to keep the application running optimally, |
| based on whatever *optimally* means in that context. |
| |
| These deployment patterns and management policies are expressed as Java (and Groovy) classes, |
| open-sourced here and giving you full control over what you want to happen. |
| More importantly, however, this code can be shared, improved, and extended. |
| |
| We're still near the beginning of figuring this out: |
| [join us to make it better](/guide/meta/contact.md). |
| |
| |
| ## To Get Started |
| |
| * See the [developer's walkthrough](/guide/start/walkthrough/) for a quick tour |
| * Check out the [examples](/guide/use/examples/), from a global web fabric with geo-DNS to a movable PaaS target |
| * Jump in to the [user guide](/guide/use/guide/) describing the |
| [concepts](/guide/use/guide/defining-applications/basic-concepts.md) |
| and including a [tutorial](/guide/use/guide/quickstart/) |
| * Or dive straight in to the code, either [reading](/guide/dev/code/) about it |
| or [gitting](http://github.com/apache/brooklyn/) it |
| |
| If you like it, or if you have ideas how it could be better, |
| [join the discussion](/guide/meta/contact.md). |