[timmorgan]

There could be a standard, but I don't think it exists today (at least not one that is supported by the services I hope to use, e.g. DigitalOcean, Amazon, Google).

This is a tool that scratches my own itch -- certainly not something I care to be the end-all of service-agnostic app installer.

[jfroma]

I think you are looking for Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) [1] which allows you not only to create one node but a cluster, their drives, network rules, autoscalling etc.

There is also another project which is cloud-init [2] that defines an standard way of mounting the initial data, and provision the shh keys.

Cloud Formation is aws implementation of this and is quite good. You can create define a template of how your application should be deployed and parameters for the end user like Heroku button.

You can check a good example of these technologies on the coreos landing page [4].

[1]: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OASIS_TOSCA https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=...

[2]: http://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[3]: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

[4]: https://coreos.com

[billions]

Soon each person will have a computer in the cloud. There is no reason why apps shouldn't be as easy to install on any user-provided server as on desktops. I am very excited about this and would be interested helping code it.

[wmf]

I think https://sandstorm.io/ is the leading project in this area.