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h1. Introduction

Petals ESB can be deployed into the cloud. By this way, to optimize hardware resources consumption:
* Petals ESB containers are instantiated on-demand,
* Service providers are placed on the right Petals ESB container according to the system load.

In a user point of view, the Petals Virtual Container (PVC) will be the service infrastructure running all service consumers and service providers. The PVC is composed of:
* nodes of the Petals Registry Overlay, that are automatically instantiated according to the system load of the Petals Registry nodes,
* Petals ESB containers that are automatically instantiated according to the system load of containers.

The user will deploy its regular Petals artifacts (shared library, components, SA or deployable SU) into the PVC. Service providers will be placed on the right container, and all dependencies (shared library, components) will be automatically deployed on this container.

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h1. Preparing the environment

Deployment of a PVC is assumed by [Roboconf|http://roboconf.net]. Make sure you have an operational Roboconf installation.

Before to install anything, you must define your software components to Roboconf:
* the software components of your applications used as service providers exposed into the PVC,
* the software components of the PVC, ie: mainly service units,
* the software components of your applications consuming service providers available into the PVC.