Actually Vertebra is not tied to Ruby on Rails at all. Since the main communication is all XMPP based, any language that can speak XMPP that implements our protocol can become part of the XMPP cloud. Our first implementation of the agent framework is written in Ruby but I expect many more languages to be supported.We will be releasing at least python and erlang based agents along with our ruby agents. We will be releasing the whole thing open source once we have locked down the protocol and made it a XEP standard, so keep an eye on my blog if you are interested.

Also Vertebra is not just for server automation, it is a framework for distributed computation of many kinds as well as a real time application platform.

The discovery mechanism and Resource based dispatch will allow for applications to get a request, discover via a Vertebra call which backend is least loaded and offers the request processing you need and then dispatching said request to the proper backend. Also allowing for map/reduce and scatter/gather style programming.

I have many ideas of where to take this thing and I cannot wait to get it out in the open so I can see what other folks do with it.