Thursday, April 09, 2015

1 command to Kubernetes with Docker compose

After 1 command to Mesos, here is 1 command to Kubernetes.

I had not looked at Kubernetes in over a month. It is a fast paced project so it is hard to keep up. If you have not looked at Kubernetes, it is roughly a cluster manager for containers. It takes a set of Docker hosts under management and schedules groups of containers in them. Kubernetes was open sourced by Google around June last year to bring all the Google knowledge of working with containers to us, a.k.a The people :) There are a lot of container schedulers or orchestrators if you wish out there, Citadel, Docker Swarm, Mesos with the Marathon framework, Cloud Foundry lattice etc. The Docker ecosystem is booming and our heads are spinning.

What I find very interesting with Kubernetes is the concept of replication controllers. Not only can you schedule groups of colocated containers together in a cluster, but you can also define replica sets. Say you have a container you want to scale up or down, you can define a replica controller and use it to resize the number of containers running. It is great for scaling when the load dictates it, but it is also great when you want to replace a container with a new image. Kubernetes also exposes a concept of services basically a way to expose a container application to all the hosts in your cluster as if it were running locally. Think the ambassador pattern of the early Docker days but on steroid.

All that said, you want to try Kubernetes. I know you do. So here is 1 command to try it out. We are going to use docker-compose like we did with Mesos and thanks to this how-to which seems to have landed 3 days ago, we are going to run Kubernetes on a single host with containers. That means that all the Kubernetes components (the "agent", the "master" and various controllers) will run in containers.

Install compose on your Docker host, if you do not have it yet:

curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.2.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Then create this YAML file, call it say k8s.yml:

etcd:
  image: kubernetes/etcd:2.0.5.1
  net: "host"
  command: /usr/local/bin/etcd --addr=127.0.0.1:4001 --bind-addr=0.0.0.0:4001 --data-dir=/var/etcd/data
master:
  image: gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0
  net: "host"
  volumes:
    - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
  command: /hyperkube kubelet --api_servers=http://localhost:8080 --v=2 --address=0.0.0.0 --enable_server --hostname_override=127.0.0.1 --config=/etc/kubernetes/manifests
proxy:
  image: gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0
  net: "host"
  privileged: true
  command: /hyperkube proxy --master=http://127.0.0.1:8080 --v=2
  

And now, 1 command:

$ docker-compose -f k8s.yml up -d

Quickly there after, you will see a bunch of containers pop-up:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                                       
a17cac87965b        kubernetes/pause:go  
659917e61d3e        gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0
caf22057dbad        gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0
288fcb4408c7        gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0
820cc546b352        kubernetes/pause:go  
0bfac38bdd10        kubernetes/etcd:2.0.5.1                               
81f58059ca8d        gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0                     
ca1590c1d5c4        gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.17.0

In the YAML file above, you see in the commands that it used a single binary hyperkube that allows you to start all the kubernetes components, the API server, the replication controller etc ... One of the components it started is the kubelet which is normally used to monitor containers on one of the host in your cluster and make sure they stay up. Here by passing the /etc/kubernetes/manifests it helped us start the other components of kubernetes defined in that manifest. Clever ! Note also that the containers where started with a host networking. So these containers have the network stack of the host, you will not see an interface on the docker bridge.

With all those up, grab the kubectl binary, that is your kubernetes client that you will use to interact with the system. The first thing you can do is list the nodes:

$ ./kubectl get nodes
NAME        LABELS    STATUS
127.0.0.1   <none>    Ready

Now start your first container:

./kubectl run-container nginx --image=nginx --port=80

That's a simple example, where you can actually start a single container. You will want to group your containers that need to be colocated and write a POD description in YAML or json than pass that to kubectl. But it looks like they extended kubectl to take single container start up. That's handy for testing.

Now list your pods:

$ ./kubectl get pods
POD           IP           CONTAINER(S)         IMAGE(S)                                    
k8s-master-127.0.0.1       controller-manager   gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.14.1
                           apiserver            gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.14.1 
                           scheduler            gcr.io/google_containers/hyperkube:v0.14.1                                                         
nginx-p2sq7   172.17.0.4   nginx                nginx                                      

You see that there is actually two pods running. The nginx one that you just started and one pod made of three containers. That's the pod that was started by your kubelet to get Kubernetes up. Kubernetes managed by Kubernetes...

It automatically created a replication controller (rc):

$ ./kubectl get rc
CONTROLLER   CONTAINER(S)   IMAGE(S)   SELECTOR              REPLICAS
nginx        nginx          nginx      run-container=nginx   1

You can have some fun with the resize capability right away and see a new container pop-up.

$ ./kubectl resize --replicas=2 rc nginx
resized

Now that is fine and dandy but there is no port exposed on the host, so you cannot access your application on the outside. That's where you want to define a service. Technically it is used to expose a service to all nodes in a cluster but of course you can bind that service proxy to a publicly routed interface:

$ ./kubectl expose rc nginx --port=80 --public-ip=192.168.33.10

Now take your browser and open it at http://192.168.33.10 (if that's the IP of your host of course) and enjoy a replicated nginx managed by Kubernetes deployed in 1 command.

You will get more of that good stuff in my book, if I manage to finish it. Wish me luck.

Running the CloudStack Simulator in Docker

CloudStack comes with a simulator. It is very handy for testing purposes, we use it to run our smoke tests on TravisCI for each commit to the code base. However if you want to run the simulator, you need to compile from source using some special maven profiles. That requires you to check out the code and setup your working environment with the dependencies for a successfull CloudStack build.

With Docker you can skip all of that and simply download the cloudstack/simulator image from the Docker Hub. Start a container from that image and expose port 8080 where the dashboard is being served. Once the container is running, you can use docker exec to configure a simulated data center. This will allow you to start fake virtual machines, create security groups and so on. You can do all of this through the dashboard or using the CloudStack API.

So you want to give CloudStack a try ? Use Docker :)

$ docker pull cloudstack/simulator

The image is a bit big and we need to work on slimming it down but once the image is pulled, starting the container will be almost instant. If you feel like sending a little PR just the Dockerfile, there might be a few obvious things to slim down the image.

$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name cloudstak cloudstack/simulator

The application needs a few minutes to start however, something that I have not had time to check. Probably we need to give more memory to the container. Once you can access the dashboard at http://localhost:8080/client you can configure the simulated data-center. You can choose between a basic network which gives you L3 network isolation or advanced zone which gives you a VLAN base isolation:

$ docker exec -ti cloudstack python /root/tools/marvin/marvin/deployDataCenter.py -i /root/setup/dev/basic.cfg

Once the configuration completes, head over to the dashboard http://localhost:8080/client and check your simulated infrastructure

Enjoy the CloudStack simulator brought to you by Docker.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

1 Command to Mesos with Docker Compose

If you have not tried Docker, you should. The sheer power it puts in your hands and the simplicity of the user experience will just wow you. In this post, I will show you how to start a one node Mesos setup with Docker compose.

Docker announced compose on February 26th. Compose allows you to describe a multi-container setup and manage it with one binary docker-compose. The containers and volumes combinations managed by Compose are defined in a YAML file, super easy to read and super easy to write. The UX is very similar to the Docker CLI.

When compose was released, I tried it and was a bit underwhelmed, as it is basically a relooking of Fig. This is not unexpected as Docker Inc, acquired Orchard the makers of Fig. But I was expecting more added functionality and even a tighter integration with the Docker client (something a dev branch actually prototyped), even a common release instead of a separate binary. I am sure this will come.

As I am writing the docker cookbook, I have deployed Wordpress 20 different ways, and it's getting a bit boring !  I was looking for more information on Mesos and its support for Docker, I re-read a terrific blog post that showed how to start a Mesos setup (zookeeper, master, slave, marathon framework) in 7 commands. Can't beat that.

When I re-read this post, I automatically thought this was an exciting use case for docker-compose. One YAML file to start Mesos/Zookeeper/Marathon and experiment with it. Of course I am not talking about a production multi-node setup. I am just looking at it for an easy Mesos experiment.
I will spare you the details of installing compose (just a curl away). The dockers docs are great.

So here is the YAML file describing our Mesos setup:

zookeeper:
  image: garland/zookeeper
  ports:
   - "2181:2181"
   - "2888:2888"
   - "3888:3888"
mesosmaster:
  image: garland/mesosphere-docker-mesos-master
  ports:
   - "5050:5050"
  links:
   - zookeeper:zk
  environment:
   - MESOS_ZK=zk://zk:2181/mesos
   - MESOS_LOG_DIR=/var/log/mesos
   - MESOS_QUORUM=1
   - MESOS_REGISTRY=in_memory
   - MESOS_WORK_DIR=/var/lib/mesos
marathon:
  image: garland/mesosphere-docker-marathon
  links:
   - zookeeper:zk
   - mesosmaster:master
  command: --master zk://zk:2181/mesos --zk zk://zk:2181/marathon
  ports:
   - "8080:8080"
mesosslave:
  image: garland/mesosphere-docker-mesos-master:latest
  ports:
   - "5051:5051"
  links:
   - zookeeper:zk
   - mesosmaster:master
  entrypoint: mesos-slave
  environment:
   - MESOS_HOSTNAME=192.168.33.10
   - MESOS_MASTER=zk://zk:2181/mesos
   - MESOS_LOG_DIR=/var/log/mesos
   - MESOS_LOGGING_LEVEL=INFO

Four containers, images pulled from Docker hub, some ports exposed on the host. Some container linking and some environment variables used to configure the Mesos slave and master. One small hickup in the Slave defintion. You will see that I set the MESOS_HOSTNAME to the IP of the host. This allows me to browse the stdout and stderr of a Marathon task, otherwise we cannot reach it easily (small improvement to be done there.)

Launch this with docker-compose:

$ ./docker-compose up -d
Recreating vagrant_zookeeper_1...
Recreating vagrant_mesosmaster_1...
Recreating vagrant_marathon_1...
Recreating vagrant_mesosslave_1...

And open your browser at http://IP_HOST:5050 then follow the rest of the blog to start a task in marathon.



Bottom line, I went from '7 commands to Mesos' to '1 command to Mesos' thanks to Docker-compose and a fairly simple YAML file. Got to love it. When compose can do this across Docker hosts in a Docker Swarm started by Machine. Then the real fun will begin !

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Rancher on RancherOS

Someone at Rancher must have some cattle in the middle of Arizona or in the backcountry of California. Or one of their VCs might be in Montana sitting in a big ranch while Docker is eating the IT world. In any case, this post is short and sweet like veggies and not like cattle (TFW) and is about Rancher and the newly announced RancherOS. Check out the rancheros announcement.

Let's keep this short, shall we ? Docker is great, but it is a daemon running on a single host. Since you want to scale :) and operate multiple servers, you need something to manage your Docker containers across multiple hosts. Several solutions are emerging, of course Docker Swarm but also Kubernetes, Lattice from Cloudfoundry and even Apache Mesos. Rancher is one of these cluster management solutions for Docker. It does some nice things like cross-hosts container linking through a custom built network overlay (think Flannel, Weave, Socketplane).

You can use Rancher with any set of Docker hosts. However, a new type of operating systems have started to appear. Container optimized OS. Or Just Enough Operating System for Docker. CoreOS, ProjectAtomic from RedHat, Ubuntu Snappy fit in that space. They aim to provide rolling atomic upgrades to the OS and run everything in it as a container. No more package manager, magic happens and you are always up to date. Package all your apps in containers, and use Rancher to run them in your cluster. End of story. Wait, enters rancherOS.

RancherOS

A couple lines of bash make all the talking:

$ git clone https://github.com/rancherio/os-vagrant.git
$ cd os-vagrant
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
[rancher@rancher ~]$ docker version
Client version: 1.5.0
…

rancherOS is a super minimalistic OS exclusively for Docker. It goes further and also runs system services as container themselves. And I will let @ibuildthecloud talk about systemd and Docker as PID 1.

[rancher@rancher ~]$ sudo system-docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                ...      NAMES
32607470eb78        console:latest      "/usr/sbin/console.s   ...      console             
d0420165c1c0        userdocker:latest   "/docker.sh"           ...      userdocker          
375a8de12183        syslog:latest       "/syslog.sh"           ...      syslog              
d284afd7f628        ntp:latest          "/ntp.sh"              ...      ntp   

The next logical question is of course....drum roll... Can I run rancher on rancheros. RinR not R&R ? And the answer is a resounding yes. I expect Rancher to come out in the next weeks maybe months with a solid product based on the two.

Rancher

If you are interested to try out RinR then check out the Ansible playbook I just made. You can use use it to deploy a cluster of rancherOS instances in AWS, and use one of them as a master and the others as workers. The master runs in a container:

$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 rancher/server 

And the workers can register with their agent:

$ sudo docker run --rm -it --privileged -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/agent http://<master_ip>:8080

Once all the workers have registered you can use the UI or the API to start containers.


As you can see I tested this at web scale with two nodes :)

Notes

In this very early super bleeding-edge testing phase (as you can tell in my good spirit today), I did find a few things that were a bit strange. Considering rancherOS was announced just last week, I am sure things will get fixed. Cloud-init support is minimal, not able to add second network interface, support for both keypair and userdata at the same time seems off. The UI was a bit slow to start and building the overlay was also a bit slow. It is also possible that I did something wrong.

Overall though, rancher is quite nice. It builds on years of experience in the team with developing CloudStack and operating clouds at scale and applies it to the Docker world. It does seem that they want to integrate with and provide the native Docker API, this would mean that users will be able to use Docker machine to add hosts to a rancher cluster, or even Docker swarm and that launching a container would also be a docker command away. How that differentiates from Swarm itself is not yet clear, but I would bet we will see additional networking and integration services in Rancher. Blurring the lines with Kubernetes ? Time will tell.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

O'Reilly Docker cookbook

The last two months have been busy as I am writing the O'Reilly Docker cookbook at night and on week-ends. CloudStack during the day, Docker at night :) You can read the very "drafty" preface on Safari and you will get a sense of why I started writing the book.

Docker is amazing, it brings a terrific user experience to packaging application and deploying them easily. It is also a software that is moving very fast with over 5,500 pull requests closed so far. The community is huge and folks are very excited about it, just check those 18,000+ stars on Github.

Writing a book on Docker means reading all the documentation, reading countless blogs that are flying through twitter and then because its a cookbook, you need to get your hands dirty and actually try everything, test everything, over and over again. A cookbook is made of recipes in a very set format: Problem, Solution, Discussion. It is meant to be picked up at anytime, opened at any page and read a recipe that is independent of all the others. The book is now on pre-release, it means that you can buy it and get the very drafty version of the book as I write it, mistakes, typos and bad grammar included. As I keep writing you get the updates and once I am done you of course get the final proof-read, corrected and reviewed version.

As I started writing, I thought I would share some of the snippets of code I am writing to do the recipes. The code is available on GitHub at the how2dock account. How2dock should become a small company for Docker training and consulting as soon as I find spare time :).

What you will find there is not really code, but really a repository of scripts and Vagrantfiles that I use in the book to showcase a particular feature or command of Docker. The repository is organized the same way than the book. You can pick a chapter and then a particular recipe then go through the README.

For instance if you are curious about Docker swarm:

$ git clone https://github.com/how2dock/docbook.git
$ cd ch07/swarm
$ vagrant up

This will bring up four virtual machines via Vagrant and do the necessary boostrapping to get the cluster setup with Swarm.

If you want to run a wordpress blog with a mysql database, checkout the fig recipe:

$ cd ch07/fig
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /vagrant
$ fig up -d

And enjoy Wordpress :)

I put a lot more in there. You will find an example of using the Ansible Docker module, a libcloud script to start an Ubuntu Snappy instance on EC2, a Dockerfile to help you create TLS certificates (really a convenience container for testing TLS in Docker). A Docker machine setup and a recipe on using Supervisor.

As I keep writing, I will keep putting all the snippets in this How2dock repo. Except frequent changes, typos, errors...and corrections :)

And FWIW, it is much scarier to put a book out in pre-release unedited than to put some scripts up on GitHub.

Suggestions, comments, reviews all welcome ! Happy Docking !

Thursday, October 02, 2014

CloudStack simulator on Docker

Docker is a lot of fun, one of its strength is in the portability of applications. This gave me the idea to package the CloudStack management server as a docker image.

CloudStack has a simulator that can fake a data center infrastructure. It can be used to test some of the basic functionalities. We use it to run our integration tests, like the smoke tests on TravisCI. The simulator allows us to configure an advanced or basic networking zone with fake hypervisors.

So I bootstrapped the CloudStack management server, configured the Mysql database with an advanced zone and created a docker image with Packer. The resulting image is on DockerHub, and I realized after the fact that four other great minds already did something similar :)

On a machine running docker:

docker pull runseb/cloudstack
docker run -t -i -p 8080:8080 runseb/cloudstack:0.1.4 /bin/bash
# service mysql restart
# cd /opt/cloudstack
# mvn -pl client jetty:run -Dsimulator

Then open your browser on http://<IP_of_docker_host>:8080/client and enjoy !

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

On Docker and Kubernetes on CloudStack

On Docker and Kubernetes on CloudStack

Docker has pushed containers to a new level, making it extremely easy to package and deploy applications within containers. Containers are not new, with Solaris containers and OpenVZ among several containers technologies going back 2005. But Docker has caught on quickly as mentioned by @adrianco. The startup speed is not surprising for containers, the portability is reminiscent of the Java goal to "write once run anywhere". What is truly interesting with Docker is that availability of Docker registries (e.g Docker Hub) to share containers and the potential to change the application deployment workflows.

Rightly so, we should soon see IT move to a docker based application deployment, where developers package their applications and make them available to Ops. Very much like we have been using war files. Embracing a DevOps mindset/culture should be easier with Docker. Where it becomes truly interesting is when we start thinking about an infrastructure whose sole purpose is to run containers. We can envision a bare operating system with a single goal to manage docker based services. This should make sys admin life easier.

The role of the Cloud with Docker

While the buzz around Docker has been truly amazing and a community has grown over night, some may think that this signals the end of the cloud. I think it is far from the truth as Docker may indeed become the killer app of the cloud.

A IaaS layer is what is: an infrastructure orchestration layer, while Docker and its ecosystem will become the application orchestration layer.

The question then becomes: How do I run Docker in the cloud ? And there is a straightforward answer: Just install Docker in your cloud templates. Whether on AWS or GCE or Azure or your private cloud, you can prepare linux based templates that provide Docker support. If you are aiming for the bare operating system whose sole purpose is to run Docker then the new CoreOS linux distribution might be your best pick. CoreOS provides rolling upgrades of the kernel, systemd based services, a distributed key value store (i.e etcd) and a distributed service scheduling system (i.e fleet)

exoscale an Apache CloudStack based public clouds, recently announced the availability of CoreOS templates.

Like exoscale, any cloud provider be it public or private can make CoreOS templates available. Providing Docker within the cloud instantly.

Docker application orchestration, here comes Kubernetes

Running one container is easy, but running multiple coordinated containers across a cluster of machines is not yet a solved problem. If you think of an application as a set of containers, starting these on multiple hosts, replicating some of them, accessing distributed databases, providing proxy services and fault tolerance is the true challenge.

However, Google came to the resuce and announced Kubernetes a system that solves these issues and makes managing scalable, fault-tolerant container based apps doable :)

Kubernetes is of course available on Google public cloud GCE, but also in Rackspace, Digital Ocean and Azure. It can also be deployed on CoreOS easily.

Kubernetes on CloudStack

Kubernetes is under heavy development, you can test it with Vagrant. Under the hood, aside from the go code :), most of the deployment solutions use SaltStack recipes but if you are a Chef, Puppet or Ansible user I am sure we will see recipes for those configuration management solution soon.

But you surely got the same idea that I had :) Since Kubernetes can be deployed on CoreOS and that CoreOS is available on exoscale. We are just a breath away from running Kubernetes on CloudStack.

It took a little more than a breath, but you can clone kubernetes-exoscale and you will get running in 10 minutes. With a 3 node etcd cluster and a 5 node kubernetes cluster, running a Flannel overlay.

CloudStack supports EC2 like userdata, and the CoreOS templates on exoscale support cloud-init, hence passing some cloud-config files to the instance deployment was straightforward. I used libcloud to provision all the nodes, created proper security groups to let the Kubernetes nodes access the etcd cluster and let the Kubernetes nodes talk to each other, especially to open a UDP port to build a networking overlay with Flannel. Fleet is used to launch all the Kubernetes services. Try it out.

Conclusions.

Docker is extremely easy to use and taking advantage of a cloud you can get started quickly. CoreOS will put your docker work on steroid with availability to start apps as systemd services over a distributed cluster. Kubernetes will up that by giving you replication of your containers and proxy services for free (time).

We might see pure docker based public clouds (e.g think Mesos cluster with a Kubernetes framework). These will look much more like PaaS, especially if they integrate a Docker registry and a way to automatically build docker images (e.g think continuous deployment pipeline).

But a "true" IaaS is actually very complimentary, providing multi-tenancy, higher security as well as multiple OS templates. So treating docker as a standard cloud workload is not a bad idea. With three dominant public clouds in AWS, GCE and Azure and a multitude of "regional" ones like exoscale it appears that building a virtualization based cloud is a solved problem (at least with Apache CloudStack :)).

So instead of talking about cloudifying your application, maybe you should start thinking about Dockerizing your applications and letting them loose on CloudStack.

Friday, July 11, 2014

GCE Interface to CloudStack

Gstack, a GCE compatible interface to CloudStack

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Google public cloud. In december 2013, Google announced the General Availability (GA) of GCE. With AWS and Microsoft Azure, it is one of the three leading public clouds in the market. Apache CloudStack now has a brand new GCE compatible interface (Gstack) that lets users use the GCE clients (i.e gcloud and gcutil) to access their CloudStack cloud. This has been made possible through the Google Summer of Code program.

Last summer Ian Duffy, a student from Dublin City University participated in GSoC through the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and worked on a LDAP plugin to CloudStack. He did such a great job that he finished early and was made an Apache CloudStack committer. Since he was done with his original GSoC project I encouraged him to take on a new one :), he brought in a friend for the ride: Darren Brogan. Both of them worked for fun on the GCE interface to CloudStack and learned Python doing so.

They remained engaged with the CloudStack community and has a third year project worked on an Amazon EC2 interface to CloudStack using what they learned from the GCE interface. They got an A :). Since they loved it so much, Darren applied to the GSoC program and proposed to go back to Gstack, improve it, extend the unittests and make it compatible with the GCE v1 API.

Technically, Gstack is a Python Flask application that provides a REST API compatible with the GCE API and forwards the requests to the corresponding CloudStack API. The source is available on GitHub and the binary is downloadable via PyPi. Let's show you how to use it.

Installation and Configuration of Gstack

You can grab the Gstack binary package from Pypi using pip in one single command.

pip install gstack

Or if you plan to explore the source and work on it, you can Clone the repository and install it by hand. Pull requests are of course welcome.

git clone https://github.com/NOPping/gstack.git
sudo python ./setup.py install

Both of these installation methods will install a gstack and a gstack-configure binary in your path. Before running Gstack you must configure it. To do so run:

gstack-configure

And enter your configuration information when prompted. You will need to specify the host and port where you want gstack to run on, as well as the CloudStack endpoint that you want gstack to forward the requests to. In the example below we use the exoscale cloud:

$ gstack-configure
gstack bind address [0.0.0.0]: localhost
gstack bind port [5000]: 
Cloudstack host [localhost]: api.exoscale.ch
Cloudstack port [8080]: 443
Cloudstack protocol [http]: https
Cloudstack path [/client/api]: /compute

The information will be stored in a configuration file available at ~/.gstack/gstack.conf:

$ cat ~/.gstack/gstack.conf 
PATH = 'compute/v1/projects/'
GSTACK_BIND_ADDRESS = 'localhost'
GSTACK_PORT = '5000'
CLOUDSTACK_HOST = 'api.exoscale.ch'
CLOUDSTACK_PORT = '443'
CLOUDSTACK_PROTOCOL = 'https'
 CLOUDSTACK_PATH = '/compute'

You are now ready to start Gstack in the foreground with:

gstack

That's all there is to running Gstack. To be able to use it as if you were talking to GCE however, you need to use gcutil and configure it a bit.

Using gcutil with Gstack

The current version of Gstack only works with the stand-alone version of gcutil. Do not use the version of gcutil bundled in the Google Cloud SDK. Instead install the 0.14.2 version of gcutil. Gstack comes with a self-signed certificate for the local endpoint gstack/data/server.crt, copy the certificate to the gcutil certificates file gcutil/lib/httplib2/httplib2/cacerts.txt. A bit dirty I know, but that's a work in progress.

At this stage your CloudStack apikey and secretkey need to be entered in the gcutil auth_helper.py file at gcutil/lib/google_compute_engine/gcutil/auth_helper.py.

Again not ideal but hopefully gcutil or the Cloud SDK will soon be able to configure those without touching the source. Darren and Ian opened a feature request with google to pass the client_id and client_secret as options to gcutil, hopefully future release of gcutil will allow us to do so.

Now, create a cached parameters file for gcutil. Assuming you are running gstack on your local machine, using the defaults that were suggested during the configuration phase. Modify ~/.gcutil_params with the following:

--auth_local_webserver
--auth_host_port=9999
--dump_request_response
--authorization_uri_base=https://localhost:5000/oauth2
--ssh_user=root
--fetch_discovery
--auth_host_name=localhost
--api_host=https://localhost:5000/

Warning: Make sure to set the --auth_host_name variable to the same value as GSTACK_BIND_ADDRESS in your ~/.gstack/gstack.conf file. Otherwise you will see certificates errors.

With this setup complete, gcutil will issues requests to the local Flask application, get an OAuth token, issue requests to your CloudStack endpoint and return the response in a GCE compatible format.

Example with exoscale.

You can now start issuing standard gcutil commands. For illustration purposes we use Exoscale. Since there are several semantic differences, you will notice that as a project we use the account information from CloudStack. Hence we pass our email address as the project value.

Let's start by listing the availability zones:

$ gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com listzones
+----------+--------+------------------+
| name     | status | next-maintenance |
+----------+--------+------------------+
| ch-gva-2 | UP     | None scheduled   |
+----------+--------+------------------+

Let's list the machine types or in CloudStack terminology: the compute service offerings and to list the available images.

$ ./gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com listimages
$ gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com listmachinetypes
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| name        | zone     | cpus | memory-mb | deprecation |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Micro       | ch-gva-2 |    1 |       512 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Tiny        | ch-gva-2 |    1 |      1024 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Small       | ch-gva-2 |    2 |      2048 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Medium      | ch-gva-2 |    2 |      4096 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Large       | ch-gva-2 |    4 |      8182 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Extra-large | ch-gva-2 |    4 |     16384 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+
| Huge        | ch-gva-2 |    8 |     32184 |             |
+-------------+----------+------+-----------+-------------+

You can also list firewalls which gstack maps to CloudStack security groups. To create a securitygroup, use the firewall commands:

$ ./gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com addfirewall ssh --allowed=tcp:22
$ ./gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com getfirewall ssh

To start an instance you can follow the interactive prompt given by gcutil. You will need to pass the --permit_root_ssh flag, another one of those semantic and access configuration that needs to be ironed out. The interactive prompt will let you choose the machine type and the image that you want, it will then start the instance

$ ./gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com addinstance foobar
Selecting the only available zone: CH-GV2
1: Extra-large  Extra-large 16384mb 4cpu
2: Huge Huge 32184mb 8cpu
3: Large    Large 8192mb 4cpu
4: Medium   Medium 4096mb 2cpu
5: Micro    Micro 512mb 1cpu
6: Small    Small 2048mb 2cpu
7: Tiny Tiny 1024mb 1cpu
7
1: CentOS 5.5(64-bit) no GUI (KVM)
2: Linux CentOS 6.4 64-bit
3: Linux CentOS 6.4 64-bit
4: Linux CentOS 6.4 64-bit
5: Linux CentOS 6.4 64-bit
6: Linux CentOS 6.4 64-bit
<...snip>
INFO: Waiting for insert of instance . Sleeping for 3s.
INFO: Waiting for insert of instance . Sleeping for 3s.

Table of resources:

+--------+--------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| name   | network-ip   | external-ip  | zone     | status  |
+--------+--------------+--------------+----------+---------+
| foobar | 185.1.2.3    | 185.1.2.3    | ch-gva-2 | RUNNING |
+--------+--------------+--------------+----------+---------+

Table of operations:

+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+
| name         | status | insert-time              | operation-type |
+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+
| e4180d83-31d0| DONE   | 2014-06-09T10:31:35+0200 | insert         |
+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+

You can of course list (with listinstances) and delete instances

$ ./gcutil --cached_flags_file=~/.gcutil_params --project=runseb@gmail.com deleteinstance foobar
Delete instance foobar? [y/n]
y 
WARNING: Consider passing '--zone=CH-GV2' to avoid the unnecessary zone lookup which requires extra API calls.
INFO: Waiting for delete of instance . Sleeping for 3s.
+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+
| name         | status | insert-time              | operation-type |
+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+
| d421168c-4acd| DONE   | 2014-06-09T10:34:53+0200 | delete         |
+--------------+--------+--------------------------+----------------+

Gstack is still a work in progress, it is now compatible with GCE GA v1.0 API. The few differences in API semantics need to be investigated further and additional API calls need to be supported. However it provides a solid base to start working on hybrid solutions between GCE public cloud and a CloudStack based private cloud.

GSoC has been terrific to Ian and Darren, they both learned how to work with an open source community and ultimately became part of it through their work. They learned tools like JIRA, git, Review Board and became less shy with working publicly on a mailing lists. Their work on Gstack and EC2stack is certainly of high value to CloudStack and should become the base for interesting products that will use hybrid clouds.

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Eutester with CloudStack

Eutester

An interesting tool based on Boto is Eutester it was created by the folks at Eucalyptus to provide a framework to create functional tests for AWS zones and Eucalyptus based clouds. What is interesting with eutester is that it could be used to compare the AWS compatibility of multiple clouds. Therefore the interesting question that you are going to ask is: Can we use Eutester with CloudStack ? And the answer is Yes. Certainly it could use more work but the basic functionality is there.

Install eutester with:

pip install eutester

Then start Python/iPython interactive shell or write a script that will import ec2ops and create a connection object to your AWS EC2 compatible endpoint. For example, using ec2stack:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    from eucaops import ec2ops
    from IPython.terminal.embed import InteractiveShellEmbed

    accesskey="my api key"
    secretkey="my secret key"

    conn.ec2ops.EC2ops(endpoint="localhost",
                   aws_access_key_id=apikey,
                   aws_secret_access_key=secretkey,
                   is_secure=False,
                   port=5000,
                   path="/",
                   APIVersion="2014-02-01")

    ipshell = InteractiveShellEmbed(banner1="Hello Cloud Shell !!")
    ipshell()

Eutester at the time of this writing has 145 methods. Only the methods available through the CloudStack AWS EC2 interface will be availble. For example, get_zones and get_instances would return:

In [3]: conn.get_zones()
Out[3]: [u'ch-gva-2']

In [4]: conn.get_instances()
[2014-05-21 05:39:45,094] [EUTESTER] [DEBUG]: 
--->(ec2ops.py:3164)Starting method: get_instances(self, state=None, 
     idstring=None, reservation=None, rootdevtype=None, zone=None,
     key=None, pubip=None, privip=None, ramdisk=None, kernel=None,
     image_id=None, filters=None)
Out[4]: 
[Instance:5a426582-3aa3-49e0-be3f-d2f9f1591f1f,
 Instance:95ee8534-b171-4f79-9e23-be48bf1a5af6,
 Instance:f18275f1-222b-455d-b352-3e7b2d3ffe9d,
 Instance:0ea66049-9399-4763-8d2f-b96e9228e413,
 Instance:7b2f63d6-66ce-4e1b-a481-e5f347f7e559,
 Instance:46d01dfd-dc81-4459-a4a8-885f05a87d07,
 Instance:7158726e-e76c-4cd4-8207-1ed50cc4d77a,
 Instance:14a0ce40-0ec7-4cf0-b908-0434271369f6]

This example shows that I am running eight instances at the moment in a zone called ch-gva-2, our familiar exoscale. Selecting one of these instance objects will give you access to all the methods available for instances. You could also list, delete and create keypairs. List, delete and create security groups etc.

Eutester is meant for building integration tests and easily creating test scenarios. If you are looking for a client to build an application with, use Boto.

The master branch of eutester may still cause problems to list images from a CloudStack cloud. I recently patched a fork of the testing branch and opened an issue on their github page. You might want to check its status if you want to use eutester heavily.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Migrating from Publican to Sphinx and Read The Docs

Migration from Publican to Sphinx and Read The Docs

When we started with Cloudstack we chose to use publican for our documentation. I don't actually know why, except that Red Hat documentation is entirely based on publican. Perhaps David Nalley's background with Fedora influenced us :) In any case publican is a very nice documentation building system, it is based on the docbook format and has great support for localization. However it can become difficult to read and organize lots of content, and builds may break for strange reasons. We also noticed that we were not getting many contributors to the documentation, in contrast, the translation efforts via transifex has had over 80 contributors. As more features got added to CloudStack the quality of the content also started to suffer and we also faced issues with publishing the translated documents. We needed to do something, mainly making it easier to contribute to our documentation. Enters ReStructured Text (RST) and Read The Docs (RTD).

Choosing a new format

We started thinking about how to make our documentation easier to contribute to. Looking at Docbook, purely xml based, it is a powerful format but not very developer friendly. A lot of us are happy with basic text editor, with some old farts like me mainly stuck with vi. Markdown has certainly helped a lot of folks in writing documentation and READMEs, just look at Github projects. I started writing in Markdown and my production in terms of documentation and tutorials skyrocketed, it is just a great way to write docs. Restructured Text is another alternative, not really markdown, but pretty close. I got familiar with RST in the Apache libcloud project and fell in love with it, or at least liked it way more than docbook. RST is basically text, only a few markups to learn and your off.

Publishing Platform

A new format is one thing but you then need to build documentation in multiple formats: html, pdf, epub potentially more. How do you move from .rst to these formats for your projects ? Comes in Sphinx, pretty much an equivalent to publican originally aimed at Python documentation but now aimed at much more. Installing sphinx is easy, for instance on Debian/Ubuntu:
apt-get install python-sphinx
You will then have the sphinx-quickstart command in your path, use it to create your sphinx project, add content in index.rst and build the docs with make html. Below is a basic example for a ff sample project.




What really got me sold on reStructuredText and Sphinx was ReadTheDocs (RTD). It hosts documentation for open source projects. It automatically pulls your documentation from your revision control system and builds the docs. The killer feature for me was the integration with github (not just git). Using hooks, RTD can trigger builds on every commit and it also displays an edit on github icon on each documentation page. Click on this icon, and the docs repository will get forked automatically on your github account. This means that people can edit the docs straight up in the github UI and submit pull requests as they read the docs and find issues.

Conversion

After [PROPOSAL] and [DISCUSS] threads on the cloudstack mailing list, we reached consensus and decided to make the move. This is still on-going but we are getting close to going live with our new docs in RST and hosted by RTD. There were couple challenges:
  1. Converting the existing docbook based documentation to RST
  2. Setting up new repos, CNAMEs and Read The Docs projects
  3. Setting up the localization with transifex
The conversion was much easier than expected thanks to pandoc, one of those great command line utility that saves your life.
pandoc -f docbook -t rst -o test.rst test.docbook
You get the just of it, iterate through your docbook files and generate the RST files, combine everything to reconstruct your chapters and books and re-organize as you wish. They are off course couple gotchas, namely the table formatting may not be perfect, the note and warnings may be a bit out of whack and the heading levels should probably be checked. All of these are actually good to check as a first pass through the docs to revamp the content and the way it is organized.
One thing that we decided to do before talking about changing the format was to move our docs to a separate repository. What we wanted to do was to be able to release docs on a different time frame than the code release, as well as make any doc bug fixes go live as fast as possible and not wait for a code release (that's a long discussion...). With a documentation specific repo in place, we used Sphinx to create the proper directory structure and add the converted RST files. Then we created a project on Read The Docs and pointed to the github mirror of our Apache git repo. Pointing to the github mirror allowed us to enable the nice github interaction that RTD provides. The new doc site looks like this.



There is a bit more to it, as we actually created several repositories and used a RTD feature called subprojects to make all the docs live under the same CNAME docs.cloudstack.apache.org. This is still work in progress but in track for the 4.3 code release. I hope to be able to announce the new documentation sites shortly after 4.3 is announced.
The final hurdle is the localization support. Sphinx provides utilities to generate POT files. They can then be uploaded to transifex and translation strings can be pulled to construct the translated docs. The big challenge that we are facing is to not loose the existing translation that were done from the docbook files. Strings may have changed. We are still investigating how to not loose all that work and get back on our feet to serve the translated docs. The Japanese translators have started to look at this.
Overall the migration was easy, ReStructuredText is easy, Sphinx is also straigthfoward and Read The Docs provides a great hosting platform well integrated with Github. Once we go live, we will see if our doc contributors increase significantly, we have already seen a few pull requests come in, which is very encouraging.
I will be talking about all of this at the Write The Docs conference in Budapest on March 31st, april 1st. If you are in the area stop by :)

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Why CloudStack is not a Citrix project

I was at CloudExpo Europe in London last week for the Open Cloud Forum to give a tutorial on CloudStack tools. A decent crowd showed up, all carrying phones. Kind of problematic for a tutorial where I wanted the audience to install python packages and actually work :) Luckily I made it self-paced so you can follow at home. Giles from Shapeblue was there too and he was part of a panel on Open Cloud. He was told once again "But Apache CloudStack is a Citrix project !" This in itself is a paradox and as @jzb told me on twitter yesterday "Citrix donated CloudStack to Apache, the end". Apache projects do not have any company affiliation.

I don't blame folks, with all the vendors seemingly supporting OpenStack, it does seem that CloudStack is a one supporter project. The commit stats are also pretty clear with 39% of commits coming from Citrix. This number is also probably higher since those stats are reporting gmail and apache as domain contributing 20 and 15% respectively, let's say 60% is from Citrix. But nonetheless, this is ignoring and mis-understanding what Apache is and looking at the glass half empty.

When Citrix donated CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) it relinquished control of the software and the brand. This actually put Citrix in a bind, not being able to easily promote the CloudStack project. Indeed, CloudStack is now a trademark of the ASF and Citrix had to rename their own product CloudPlatform (powered by Apache CloudStack). Citrix cannot promote CloudStack directly, it needs to get approval to donate sponsoring and follow the ASF trademark guidelines. Every committer and especially PMC members of Apache CloudStack are now supposed to work and protect the CloudStack brand as part of the ASF and make sure that any confusion is cleared. This is what I am doing here.

Of course when the software was donated, an initial set of committers was defined, all from Citrix and mostly from the former cloud.com startup. Part of the incubating process at the ASF is to make sure that we can add committers from other organization and attract a community. "Community over Code" is the bread and butter of ASF and so this is what we have all been working on, expanding the community outside Citrix, welcoming anyone who thinks CloudStack is interesting enough to contribute a little bit of time and effort. Looking at the glass half empty is saying that CloudStack is a Citrix project "Hey look 60% of their commits is from Citrix", looking at it half full like I do is saying "Oh wow, in a year since graduation, they have diversified the committer based, 40% are not from Citrix". Is 40% enough ? of course not, I wish it were the other way around, I wish Citrix were only a minority in the development of CloudStack.

Couple other numbers: Out of the 26 members of the project management committee (PMC) only seven are from Citrix and looking at mailing lists participation since the beginning of the year, 20% of the folks on the users mailing list and 25% on the developer list are from Citrix. We have diversified the community a great deal but the "hand-over", that moment when new community members are actually writing more code than the folks who started it, has not happened yet. A community is not just about writing code, but I will give it to you that it is not good for a single company to "control" 60% of the development, this is not where we/I want to be.

This whole discussion is actually against Apache's modus operandi. Since one of the biggest tenant of the foundation is non-affiliation. When I participate on the list I am Sebastien, I am not a Citrix employee. Certainly this can put some folks in conflicting situations at times, but the bottom line is that we do not and should not take into account company affiliation when working and making decisions for the project. But if you really want some company name dropping, let's do an ASF faux-pas and let's look at a few features:

The Nicira/NSX and OpenDaylight SDN integration was done by Schuberg Phillis, the OpenContrail plugin was done by Juniper, Midokura created it's own plugin for Midonet and Stratosphere as well, giving us a great SDN coverage. The LXC integration was done by Gilt, Klarna is contributing in the ecosystem with the vagrant and packer plugins, CloudOps has been doing terrific job with Chef recipes, Palo-Alto networks integration and Netscaler support, a google summer of code intern did a brand new LDAP plugin and another GSoC did the GRE support for KVM. RedHat contributed the Gluster plugin and PCExtreme contributed the Ceph interface while Basho of course contributed the S3 plugin for secondary storage as well as major design decisions on the storage refactor. The Solidfire plugin was done by, well Solidfire and Netapp has developed a plugin as well for their virtual storage console. NTT contributed the CloudFoundry interface via BOSH. On the user side, Shapeblue is leading the user support company. So no it's not just Citrix.

Are all these companies members of the CloudStack project ? No. There is no such thing as a company being a member of an ASF project. There is no company affiliation, there is no lock in, just a bunch of guys trying to make good software and build a community. And yes, I work for Citrix and my job here will be done when Citrix only contributes 49% of the commits. Citrix is paying me to make sure they loose control of the software, that a healthy ecosystem develops and that CloudStack keeps on becoming a strong and vibrant Apache project. I hope one day folks will understand what CloudStack has become, an ASF project, like HTTP, Hadoop, Mesos, Ant, Maven, Lucene, Solr and 150 other projects. Come to Denver for #apachecon you will see ! The end.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

PaaS with CloudStack

A few talks from CCC in Amsterdam

In November at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference I was pleased to see several talks on PaaS. We had Uri Cohen (@uri1803) from Gigaspaces, Marc-Elian Begin (@lemeb) from Sixsq and Alex Heneveld (@ahtweetin) from CloudSoft. We also had some related talks -depending on your definition of PaaS- with talks about Docker and Vagrant.

PaaS variations

The differences between PaaS solutions is best explained by this picture from AWS FAQ about application management.
There is clearly a spectrum that goes from operational control to pure application deployment. We could argue that true PaaS abstracts the operational details and that management of the underlying infrastructure should be totally hidden, that said, automation of virtual infrastructure deployment has reached such a sophisticated state that it blurs the definition between IaaS and PaaS. Not suprisingly AWS offers services that covers the entire spectrum.
Since I am more on the operation side, I tend to see a PaaS as an infrastructure automation framework. For instance I look for tools to deploy a MongoDB cluster or a RiakCS cluster. I am not looking for an abstract plaform that has Monogdb pre-installed and where I can turn a knob to increase the size of the cluster or manage my shards. An application person will prefer to look at something like Google App Engine and it's open source version Appscale. I will get back to all these differences in a next post on PaaS but this article by @DavidLinthicum that just came out is a good read.

Support for CloudStack

What is interesting for the CloudStack community is to look at the support for CloudStack in all these different solutions wherever they are in the application management spectrum.
  • Cloudify from Gigaspaces was all over twitter about their support for OpenStack, and I was getting slightly bothered with the lack of CloudStack support. That's why it was great to see Uri Cohen in Amstredam. He delivered a great talk and he gave me a demo of Cloudify. I was very impressed of course by the slick UI but overall by the ability to provision complete application/infrastructure definitions on clouds. Underlying it uses Apache jclouds, so there was no reason that it could not talk to CloudStack. Over christmas Uri did a terrific job and the CloudStack support is now tested and documented. It works not only on the commercial version from Citrix CloudPlatform but also with Apache CloudStack. And of course it works with my neighbors Cloud exoscale
  • Slipstream is not widely known but worth a look. At CCC @lemeb demoed a CloudStack driver. Since then, they now offer an hosted version of their slipstream cloud orchestration framework which turns out to be hosted on exoscale CloudStack cloud. Slipstream is more of a Cloud broker than a PaaS but it automates application deployment on multiple clouds abstracting the various cloud APIs and offering application templates for deployments of virtual infrastructure. Check it out.
  • Cloudsoft main application deployment engine is brooklyn, it originated from Alex Heneveld contribution to Apache Whirr that I wrote about couple times. But it can use OpenShift for additional level of PaaS. I will need to check with Alex how they are doing this, as I believe Openshift uses LXC. Since CloudStack has LXC support, one ought to be able to use Brooklyn to deploy a LXC cluster on CloudStack and then use OpenShift to manage deployed applications.
  • A quick note on OpenShift. As far as I understand, it actually uses a static cluster. The scalability comes from the use of containes in the nodes. So technically you could create an OpenShift cluster in CloudStack, but I don't think we will see OpenShift talking directly to the CloudStack API to add nodes. Openshift bypasses the IaaS APIs. Of course I have not looked at it in a while and I may be wrong :)
  • Talking about PaaS for Vagrant is probably a bit far fetched, but it fits the infrastructure deployment criteria and could be compared with AWS OpsWorks. Vagrant helps to define reproducible machines so that devs and ops can actually work on the same base servers. But Vagrant with its plugins can also help deployment on public clouds, and can handle multiple server definitions. So one can look at a Vagrantfile as a template defintion for a virtual infrastructure deployment. As a matter of fact, there are many Vagrant boxes out there to deploy things like Apache Mesos clusters, MongoDB, RiakCS clusters etc. It's not meant to manage that stack in production but at a minimum can help develop it. Vagrant has a CloudStack plugin demoed by Hugo Correia from Klarna at CCC. Exoscale took the bait and created a set of -exoboxes- that's real gold for developers deploying in exoscale and any CloudStack provider should follow suit.
  • Which brings me on to Docker, there is currently no support for Docker in CloudStack. We do have LXC support therefore it would not be to hard to have a 'docker' cluster in CloudStack. You could even install docker within an image and deploy that on KVM or Xen. Of course some would argue that using containers within VMs defeats the purpose. In any case, with the Docker remote API you could then manage your containers. OpenStack already has a Docker integration, we will dig deeper into Docker functionality to see how best to integrate it in CloudStack.
  • AWS as I mentioned has several PaaS like layers with OpsWorks, CloudFormation, Beanstalk. CloudStack has an EC2 interface but also has a third party solution to enabled CloudFormation. This is still under development but pretty close to full functionality, check out stackmate and its web interface stacktician. With a CF interface to CloudStack we could see a OpSWork and a Beanstalk interface coming in the future.
  • Finally, not present at CCC but the leader of PaaS for enterprise is CloudFoundry. I am going to see Andy Piper (@andypiper) in London next week and will make sure to talk to him about the recent CloudStack support that was merged in the cloudfoundry community repo. It came from folks in Japan and I have not had time to test it. Certainly we as a community should look at this very closely to make sure there is outstanding support for CloudFoundry in ACS.
It is not clear what the frontier between PaaS and IaaS is, it is highly dependent on the context, who you are and what you are trying to achieve. But CloudStack offers several interfaces to PaaS or shall I say PaaS offer several connectors to CloudStack :)

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Clojure with CloudStack

CloStack

CloStack is a Clojure client for Apache CloudStack. Clojure is a dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is compiled directly in JVM bytecode but offers a dynamic and interactive nature of an interpreted language like Python. Clojure is a dialect of LISP and as such is mostly a functional programming language.

You can try Clojure in your browser and get familiar with its read eval loop (REPL). To get started, you can follow the tutorial for non-LISP programmers through this web based REPL.

To give you a taste for it, here is how you would 2 and 2:

user=> (+ 2 2)
4

And how you would define a function:

user=> (defn f [x y]
  #_=> (+ x y))
#'user/f
user=> (f 2 3)
5

This should give you a taste of functional programming :)

Install Leinigen

leiningen is a tool for managing Clojure projects easily. With lein you can create the skeleton of clojure project as well as start a read eval loop (REPL) to test your code.

Installing the latest version of leiningen is easy, get the script and set it in your path. Make it executable and your are done.

The first time your run lein repl it will boostrap itself:

$ lein repl
Downloading Leiningen to /Users/sebgoa/.lein/self-installs/leiningen-2.3.4-standalone.jar now...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 13.0M  100 13.0M    0     0  1574k      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 2266k
nREPL server started on port 58633 on host 127.0.0.1
REPL-y 0.3.0
Clojure 1.5.1
    Docs: (doc function-name-here)
          (find-doc "part-of-name-here")
  Source: (source function-name-here)
 Javadoc: (javadoc java-object-or-class-here)
    Exit: Control+D or (exit) or (quit)
 Results: Stored in vars *1, *2, *3, an exception in *e

user=> exit
Bye for now!

Download CloStack

To install CloStack, clone the github repository and start lein repl:

git clone https://github.com/pyr/clostack.git
$ lein repl
Retrieving codox/codox/0.6.4/codox-0.6.4.pom from clojars
Retrieving codox/codox.leiningen/0.6.4/codox.leiningen-0.6.4.pom from clojars
Retrieving leinjacker/leinjacker/0.4.1/leinjacker-0.4.1.pom from clojars
Retrieving org/clojure/core.contracts/0.0.1/core.contracts-0.0.1.pom from central
Retrieving org/clojure/core.unify/0.5.3/core.unify-0.5.3.pom from central
Retrieving org/clojure/clojure/1.4.0/clojure-1.4.0.pom from central
Retrieving org/clojure/core.contracts/0.0.1/core.contracts-0.0.1.jar from central
Retrieving org/clojure/core.unify/0.5.3/core.unify-0.5.3.jar from central
Retrieving org/clojure/clojure/1.4.0/clojure-1.4.0.jar from central
Retrieving codox/codox/0.6.4/codox-0.6.4.jar from clojars
Retrieving codox/codox.leiningen/0.6.4/codox.leiningen-0.6.4.jar from clojars
Retrieving leinjacker/leinjacker/0.4.1/leinjacker-0.4.1.jar from clojars
Retrieving org/clojure/clojure/1.3.0/clojure-1.3.0.pom from central
Retrieving org/clojure/data.json/0.2.2/data.json-0.2.2.pom from central
Retrieving http/async/client/http.async.client/0.5.2/http.async.client-0.5.2.pom from clojars
Retrieving com/ning/async-http-client/1.7.10/async-http-client-1.7.10.pom from central
Retrieving io/netty/netty/3.4.4.Final/netty-3.4.4.Final.pom from central
Retrieving org/clojure/data.json/0.2.2/data.json-0.2.2.jar from central
Retrieving com/ning/async-http-client/1.7.10/async-http-client-1.7.10.jar from central
Retrieving io/netty/netty/3.4.4.Final/netty-3.4.4.Final.jar from central
Retrieving http/async/client/http.async.client/0.5.2/http.async.client-0.5.2.jar from clojars
nREPL server started on port 58655 on host 127.0.0.1
REPL-y 0.3.0
Clojure 1.5.1
    Docs: (doc function-name-here)
          (find-doc "part-of-name-here")
  Source: (source function-name-here)
 Javadoc: (javadoc java-object-or-class-here)
    Exit: Control+D or (exit) or (quit)
 Results: Stored in vars *1, *2, *3, an exception in *e

user=> exit

The first time that you start the REPL lein will download all the dependencies of clostack.

Prepare environment variables and make your first clostack call

Export a few environmen variables to define the cloud you will be using, namely:

export CLOUDSTACK_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:8080/client/api
export CLOUDSTACK_API_KEY=HGWEFHWERH8978yg98ysdfghsdfgsagf
export CLOUDSTACK_API_SECRET=fhdsfhdf869guh3guwghseruig

Then relaunch the REPL

$lein repl
nREPL server started on port 59890 on host 127.0.0.1
REPL-y 0.3.0
Clojure 1.5.1
    Docs: (doc function-name-here)
          (find-doc "part-of-name-here")
  Source: (source function-name-here)
 Javadoc: (javadoc java-object-or-class-here)
    Exit: Control+D or (exit) or (quit)
 Results: Stored in vars *1, *2, *3, an exception in *e

user=> (use 'clostack.client)
SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: Defaulting to no-operation (NOP) logger implementation
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.
nil

You can safely discard the warning message which only indicates that 'clostack' is meant to be used as a library in a clojure project.
Define a client to your CloudStack endpoint

user=> (def cs (http-client))
#'user/cs

And call an API like so:

user=> (list-zones cs)
{:listzonesresponse {:count 1, :zone [{:id "1128bd56-b4d9-4ac6-a7b9-c715b187ce11", :name "CH-GV2", :networktype "Basic", :securitygroupsenabled true, :allocationstate "Enabled", :zonetoken "ccb0a60c-79c8-3230-ab8b-8bdbe8c45bb7", :dhcpprovider "VirtualRouter", :localstorageenabled true}]}}

To explore the API calls that you can make, the REPL features tab completion. Enter list or de and press the tab key you should see:

user=> (list
list                                list*                               list-accounts                       list-async-jobs                     
list-capabilities                   list-disk-offerings                 list-event-types                    list-events                         
list-firewall-rules                 list-hypervisors                    list-instance-groups                list-ip-forwarding-rules            
list-iso-permissions                list-isos                           list-lb-stickiness-policies         list-load-balancer-rule-instances   
list-load-balancer-rules            list-network-ac-ls                  list-network-offerings              list-networks                       
list-os-categories                  list-os-types                       list-port-forwarding-rules          list-private-gateways               
list-project-accounts               list-project-invitations            list-projects                       list-public-ip-addresses            
list-remote-access-vpns             list-resource-limits                list-security-groups                list-service-offerings              
list-snapshot-policies              list-snapshots                      list-ssh-key-pairs                  list-static-routes                  
list-tags                           list-template-permissions           list-templates                      list-virtual-machines               
list-volumes                        list-vp-cs                          list-vpc-offerings                  list-vpn-connections                
list-vpn-customer-gateways          list-vpn-gateways                   list-vpn-users                      list-zones                          
list?

user=> (de
dec                           dec'                          decimal?                      declare                       def                           
default-data-readers          definline                     definterface                  defmacro                      defmethod                     
defmulti                      defn                          defn-                         defonce                       defprotocol                   
defrecord                     defreq                        defstruct                     deftype                       delay                         
delay?                        delete-account-from-project   delete-firewall-rule          delete-instance-group         delete-ip-forwarding-rule     
delete-iso                    delete-lb-stickiness-policy   delete-load-balancer-rule     delete-network                delete-network-acl            
delete-port-forwarding-rule   delete-project                delete-project-invitation     delete-remote-access-vpn      delete-security-group         
delete-snapshot               delete-snapshot-policies      delete-ssh-key-pair           delete-static-route           delete-tags                   
delete-template               delete-volume                 delete-vpc                    delete-vpn-connection         delete-vpn-customer-gateway   
delete-vpn-gateway            deliver                       denominator                   deploy-virtual-machine        deref                         
derive                        descendants                   destroy-virtual-machine       destructure                   detach-iso                    
detach-volume

To pass arguments to a call follow the syntax:

user=> (list-templates cs :templatefilter "executable")

Start a virtual machine

To deploy a virtual machine you need to get the serviceofferingid or instance type, the templateid also known as the image id and the zoneid, the call is then very similar to CloudMonkey and returns a jobid

user=> (deploy-virtual-machine cs :serviceofferingid "71004023-bb72-4a97-b1e9-bc66dfce9470" :templateid "1d961c82-7c8c-4b84-b61b-601876dab8d0" :zoneid "1128bd56-b4d9-4ac6-a7b9-c715b187ce11")
{:deployvirtualmachineresponse {:id "d0a887d2-e20b-4b25-98b3-c2995e4e428a", :jobid "21d20b5c-ea6e-4881-b0b2-0c2f9f1fb6be"}}

You can pass additional parameters to the deploy-virtual-machine call, such as the keypair and the securitygroupname:

user=> (deploy-virtual-machine cs :serviceofferingid "71004023-bb72-4a97-b1e9-bc66dfce9470" :templateid "1d961c82-7c8c-4b84-b61b-601876dab8d0" :zoneid "1128bd56-b4d9-4ac6-a7b9-c715b187ce11" :keypair "exoscale")
{:deployvirtualmachineresponse {:id "b5fdc41f-e151-43e7-a036-4d87b8536408", :jobid "418026fc-1009-4e7a-9721-7c9ad47b49e4"}}

To query the asynchronous job, you can use the query-async-job api call:

user=> (query-async-job-result cs :jobid "418026fc-1009-4e7a-9721-7c9ad47b49e4")
{:queryasyncjobresultresponse {:jobid "418026fc-1009-4e7a-9721-7c9ad47b49e4", :jobprocstatus 0, :jobinstancetype "VirtualMachine", :accountid "b8c0baab-18a1-44c0-ab67-e24049212925", :jobinstanceid "b5fdc41f-e151-43e7-a036-4d87b8536408", :created "2013-12-16T12:25:21+0100", :jobstatus 0, :jobresultcode 0, :cmd "com.cloud.api.commands.DeployVMCmd", :userid "968f6b4e-b382-4802-afea-dd731d4cf9b9"}}

And finally to destroy the virtual machine you would pass the id of the VM to the destroy-virtual-machine call like so:

user=> (destroy-virtual-machine cs :id "d0a887d2-e20b-4b25-98b3-c2995e4e428a")
{:destroyvirtualmachineresponse {:jobid "8fc8a8cf-9b54-435c-945d-e3ea2f183935"}}

With these simple basics you can keep on exploring clostack and the CloudStack API.

Use CloStack within your own clojure project

Hello World in clojure

To write your own clojure project that makes user of clostack, use leiningen to create a project skeleton

lein new toto

Lein will automatically create a src/toto/core.clj file, edit it to replace the function foo with -main. This dummy function returns Hellow World !. Let's try to execute it. First we will need to define the main namespace in the project.clj file. Edit it like so:

defproject toto "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT" :description "FIXME: write description" :url "http://example.com/FIXME" :license {:name "Eclipse Public License" :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"} :main toto.core :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"]])

Note the :main toto.core

You can now execute the code with lein run john . Indeed if you check the -main function in src/toto/core.clj you will see that it takes an argument. Surprisingly you should see the following output:

$ lein run john
john Hello, World!

Let's now add the CloStack dependency and modify the main function to return the zone of the CloudStack cloud.

Adding the Clostack dependency

Edit the project.clj to add a dependency on clostack and a few logging packages:

:dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"]
               [clostack "0.1.3"]
               [org.clojure/tools.logging "0.2.6"]
               [org.slf4j/slf4j-log4j12   "1.6.4"]
               [log4j/apache-log4j-extras "1.0"]
               [log4j/log4j               "1.2.16"
                :exclusions [javax.mail/mail
                             javax.jms/jms
                             com.sun.jdkmk/jmxtools
                             com.sun.jmx/jmxri]]])
                             

lein should have created a resources directory. In it, create a log4j.properties file like so:

$ more log4j.properties 
# Root logger option
log4j.rootLogger=INFO, stdout

# Direct log messages to stdout
log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.Target=System.out
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} %-5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n

A discussion on logging is beyond the scope of this recipes, we merely add it in the configuration for a complete example.

Now you can edit the code in src/toto/core.clj with some basic calls.

(ns testclostack.core
  (:require [clostack.client :refer [http-client list-zones]]))

(defn foo
  "I don't do a whole lot."
  [x]
  (println x "Hello, World!"))

(def cs (http-client))

(defn -main [args]
  (println (list-zones cs))
  (println args "Hey Wassup")
  (foo args)
)

Simply run this clojure code with lein run joe in the source of your project. And that's it, you have sucessfully discovered the very basics of Clojure and used the CloudStack client clostack to write your first Clojure code. Now for something more significant, look at Pallet

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

2014 Cloud Predictions

Warning: this is written with a glass of wine on one hand, two days before vacation ...:)

1. CloudStack will abandon semantic versioning and adopt super hero names for its releases, this will make upgrade paths more understandable.

2. Someone will take Euca API server and stick CloudStack backend beneath it, adding Opennebula packaging will make this the best cloud distro of all.

3. I will finally make sense of NetflixOSS plethora of software and reach nirvana by integrating CloudStack in Asgard.

4. AWS will opensource its software killing OpenStack, and we will realize that in fact they use CloudStack with Euca in front.

5. I will understand what NFV, VNF and SDN really mean and come up with a new acronym that will set twitter on fire.

6. We will actually see some code in Solum.

7. bitcoin will crash and come back up at least five times.

8. Citrix stock will jump 100% on acquisition by IBM.

9. My boss will stop asking me for statistics.

10. Facebook will die on a Snowden revelation.

I will stop at 10 otherwise this could go on all night :)

Happy Holidays everyone

Friday, December 06, 2013

Veewee, Vagrant and CloudStack

Coming back from CloudStack conference the feeling that this is not about building clouds got stronger. This is really about what to do with them and how they bring you agility, faster-time to market and allow you to focus on innovation in your core business. A large component of this is Culture and a change of how we do IT. The DevOps movement is the embodiment of this change. Over in Amsterdam I was stoked to meet with folks that I had seen at other locations throughout Europe in the last 18 months. Folks from PaddyPower, SchubergPhilis, Inuits who all embrace DevOps. I also met new folks, including Hugo Correia from Klarna (CloudStack users) who came by to talk about Vagrant-cloudstack plugin. His talk and a demo by Roland Kuipers from Schuberg was enough to kick my butt and get me to finally check out Vagrant. I sprinkled a bit of Veewee and of course some CloudStack on top of it all. Have fun reading.

Automation is key to a reproducible, failure-tolerant infrastructure. Cloud administrators should aim to automate all steps of building their infrastructure and be able to re-provision everything with a single click. This is possible through a combination of configuration management, monitoring and provisioning tools. To get started in created appliances that will be automatically configured and provisioned, two tools stand out in the arsenal: Veewee and Vagrant.

Veewee: Veewee is a tool to easily create appliances for different hypervisors. It fetches the .iso of the distribution you want and build the machine with a kickstart file. It integrates with providers like VirtualBox so that you can build these appliances on your local machine. It supports most commonly used OS templates. Coupled with virtual box it allows admins and devs to create reproducible base appliances. Getting started with veewee is a 10 minutes exericse. The README is great and there is also a very nice post that guides you through your first box building.

Most folks will have no issues cloning Veewee from github and building it, you will need ruby 1.9.2 or above. You can get it via `rvm` or your favorite ruby version manager.

git clone https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee
gem install bundler
bundle install

Setting up an alias is handy at this point `alias veewee="bundle exec veewee"`. You will need a virtual machine provider (e.g VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, Parallels, KVM). I personnaly use VirtualBox but pick one and install it if you don't have it already. You will then be able to start using `veewee` on your local machine. Check the sub-commands available (for virtualbox):

$ veewee vbox
Commands:
  veewee vbox build [BOX_NAME]                     # Build box
  veewee vbox copy [BOX_NAME] [SRC] [DST]          # Copy a file to the VM
  veewee vbox define [BOX_NAME] [TEMPLATE]         # Define a new basebox starting from a template
  veewee vbox destroy [BOX_NAME]                   # Destroys the virtualmachine that was built
  veewee vbox export [BOX_NAME]                    # Exports the basebox to the vagrant format
  veewee vbox halt [BOX_NAME]                      # Activates a shutdown the virtualmachine
  veewee vbox help [COMMAND]                       # Describe subcommands or one specific subcommand
  veewee vbox list                                 # Lists all defined boxes
  veewee vbox ostypes                              # List the available Operating System types
  veewee vbox screenshot [BOX_NAME] [PNGFILENAME]  # Takes a screenshot of the box
  veewee vbox sendkeys [BOX_NAME] [SEQUENCE]       # Sends the key sequence (comma separated) to the box. E.g for testing the :boot_cmd_sequence
  veewee vbox ssh [BOX_NAME] [COMMAND]             # SSH to box
  veewee vbox templates                            # List the currently available templates
  veewee vbox undefine [BOX_NAME]                  # Removes the definition of a basebox 
  veewee vbox up [BOX_NAME]                        # Starts a Box
  veewee vbox validate [BOX_NAME]                  # Validates a box against vagrant compliancy rules
  veewee vbox winrm [BOX_NAME] [COMMAND]           # Execute command via winrm

Options:
          [--debug]           # enable debugging
  -w, --workdir, [--cwd=CWD]  # Change the working directory. (The folder containing the definitions folder).
                              # Default: /Users/sebgoa/Documents/gitforks/veewee

Pick a template from the `templates` directory and `define` your first box:

veewee vbox define myfirstbox CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal

You should see that a `defintions/` directory has been created, browse to it and inspect the `definition.rb` file. You might want to comment out some lines, like removing `chef` or `puppet`. If you don't change anything and build the box, you will then be able to `validate` the box with `veewee vbox validate myfirstbox`. To build the box simply do:

veewee vbox build myfristbox

Everything should be successfull, and you should see a running VM in your virtual box UI. To export it for use with `Vagrant`, `veewee` provides an export mechanism (really a VBoxManage command): `veewee vbox export myfirstbox`. At the end of the export, a .box file should be present in your directory.

Vagrant: Picking up from where we left with `veewee`, we can now add the box to Vagrant and customize it with shell scripts or much better, with Puppet recipes or Chef cookbooks. First let's add the box file to Vagrant:

vagrant box add 'myfirstbox' '/path/to/box/myfirstbox.box'

Then in a directory of your choice, create the Vagrant "project":

 
vagrant init 'myfirstbox'

This will create a `Vagrantfile` that we will later edit to customize the box. You can boot the machine with `vagrant up` and once it's up , you can ssh to it with `vagrant ssh`.

While `veewee` is used to create a base box with almost no customization (except potentially a chef and/or puppet client), `vagrant` is used to customize the box using the Vagrantfile. For example, to customize the `myfirstbox` that we just built, set the memory to 2 GB, add a host-only interface with IP 192.168.56.10, use the apache2 Chef cookbook and finally run a `boostrap.sh` script, we will have the following `Vagrantfile`:

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|

  # Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.
  config.vm.box = "myfirstbox"
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 2048]
  end

  #host-only network setup
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.56.10"

  # Chef solo provisioning
  config.vm.provision "chef_solo" do |chef|
     chef.add_recipe "apache2"
  end

  #Test script to install CloudStack
  #config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "bootstrap.sh"
  
end

The cookbook will be in a `cookbooks` directory and the boostrap script will be in the root directory of this vagrant definition. For more information, check the Vagrant website and experiment.

Vagrant and CloudStack: What is very interesting with Vagrant is that you can use various plugins to deploy machines on public clouds. There is a `vagrant-aws` plugin and of course a `vagrant-cloudstack` plugin. You can get the latest CloudStack plugin from github. You can install it directly with the `vagrant` command line:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-cloudstack

Or if you are building it from source, clone the git repository, build the gem and install it in `vagrant`

git clone https://github.com/klarna/vagrant-cloudstack.git
gem build vagrant-cloudstack.gemspec
gem install vagrant-cloudstack-0.1.0.gem
vagrant plugin install /Users/sebgoa/Documents/gitforks/vagrant-cloudstack/vagrant-cloudstack-0.1.0.gem

The only drawback that I see is that one would want to upload his local box (created from the previous section) and use it. Instead one has to create `dummy boxes` that use existing templates available on the public cloud. This is easy to do, but creates a gap between local testing and production deployments. To build a dummy box simply create a `Vagrantfile` file and a `metadata.json` file like so:

$ cat metadata.json 
{
    "provider": "cloudstack"
}
$ cat Vagrantfile 
# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :cloudstack do |cs|
    cs.template_id = "a17b40d6-83e4-4f2a-9ef0-dce6af575789"
  end
end

Where the `cs.template_id` is a uuid of a CloudStack template in your cloud. CloudStack users will know how to easily get those uuids with `CloudMonkey`. Then create a `box` file with `tar cvzf cloudstack.box ./metadata.json ./Vagrantfile`. Note that you can add additional CloudStack parameters in this box definition like the host,path etc (something to think about :) ). Then simply add the box in `Vagrant` with:

vagrant box add ./cloudstack.box

You can now create a new `Vagrant` project:

mkdir cloudtest
cd cloudtest
vagrant init

And edit the newly created `Vagrantfile` to use the `cloudstack` box. Add additional parameters like `ssh` configuration, if the box does not use the default from `Vagrant`, plus `service_offering_id` etc. Remember to use your own api and secret keys and change the name of the box to what you created. For example on exoscale:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!
VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|

  # Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.
  config.vm.box = "cloudstack"

  config.vm.provider :cloudstack do |cs, override|
    cs.host = "api.exoscale.ch"
    cs.path = "/compute"
    cs.scheme = "https"
    cs.api_key = "PQogHs2sk_3..."
    cs.secret_key = "...NNRC5NR5cUjEg"
    cs.network_type = "Basic"

    cs.keypair = "exoscale"
    cs.service_offering_id = "71004023-bb72-4a97-b1e9-bc66dfce9470"
    cs.zone_id = "1128bd56-b4d9-4ac6-a7b9-c715b187ce11"

    override.ssh.username = "root" 
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "/path/to/private/key/id_rsa_example"
  end

  # Test bootstrap script
  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "bootstrap.sh"

end

The machine is brought up with:

vagrant up --provider=cloudstack

The following example output will follow:

$ vagrant up --provider=cloudstack
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'cloudstack' provider...
[default] Warning! The Cloudstack provider doesn't support any of the Vagrant
high-level network configurations (`config.vm.network`). They
will be silently ignored.
[default] Launching an instance with the following settings...
[default]  -- Service offering UUID: 71004023-bb72-4a97-b1e9-bc66dfce9470
[default]  -- Template UUID: a17b40d6-83e4-4f2a-9ef0-dce6af575789
[default]  -- Zone UUID: 1128bd56-b4d9-4ac6-a7b9-c715b187ce11
[default]  -- Keypair: exoscale
[default] Waiting for instance to become "ready"...
[default] Waiting for SSH to become available...
[default] Machine is booted and ready for use!
[default] Rsyncing folder: /Users/sebgoa/Documents/exovagrant/ => /vagrant
[default] Running provisioner: shell...
[default] Running: /var/folders/76/sx82k6cd6cxbp7_djngd17f80000gn/T/vagrant-shell20131203-21441-1ipxq9e
Tue Dec  3 14:25:49 CET 2013
This works

Which is a perfect execution of my amazing bootstrap script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

/bin/date
echo "This works"

You can now start playing with Chef cookbooks, Puppet recipes or SaltStack formulas and automate the configuration of your cloud instances, thanks to Veewee Vagrant and CloudStack.