What is a Toolbox ServerTemplate?

Background Information

You may notice several ServerTemplates in the MultiCloud Marketplace called "Toolbox" templates, which are not used to launch servers. Why are they called ServerTemplates? What purpose do they serve?

Answer

In some legacy RightScale Dashboard releases, you could not publish RightScripts to the MultiCloud Marketplace by themselves. Instead, you had to add the scripts to a ServerTemplate and then publish the ServerTemplate. These ServerTemplates strictly served as containers for useful RightScripts. To help distinguish them from other ServerTemplates, they include a "Toolbox" designation in their names (e.g. "EBS Stripe Toolbox") to denote that the template is not used to launch server instances. Rather, it contains a collection of RightScripts that you can use with other ServerTemplates.

In the current editions of the RightScale Dashboard and MultiCloud Marketplace, you can publish RightScripts and MultiCloud Images (MCIs) by themselves. You no longer have to publish them with a ServerTemplate. Similarly, you can also import RightScripts into the Dashboard by themselves. You no longer have to download the ServerTemplate containing those RightScripts in order to access them. RIghtScale, however, will continue to publish "Toolbox" ServerTemplates, mainly because it's a convenient way to group sets of related RightScripts.