CloudStack, jclouds, Jenkins and CloudCat

CloudStack and jcloudsAndrew Bayer

@abayer

Saturday, December 1, 2012

What is jclouds?

• Portable Java API for many cloud APIs and providers

• Compute and Blobstore

• Lower-level Java API for cloud-specific APIs as well

• Usable with any JVM language


CloudStack and jclouds

• CloudStack is supported by jclouds

• 2.x and 3.x tested regularly

• 4.x hasn’t been tested much yet, but minimal API changes from 3.x


Standard jclouds API and CloudStack

• CloudStack support for jcloud standard API:

• Instance creation/management

• Listing available “hardware” (service offerings), “images” (templates)

• Security groups


Lower-level CloudStack API with jclouds

• Pretty much everything the CloudStack API can do is implemented in jclouds

• Administration tasks

• Template creation

• User management

• Much, much more


What can you do with jclouds and CloudStack?


A lot.Here are some

examples.


jclouds Jenkins plugin

• Dynamically provision Jenkins build slaves from CloudStack (or any other supported cloud)

• Much like the Jenkins ec2 plugin, but more features and obviously more clouds


How the Jenkins plugin works

• Uses standard jclouds API for instance creation and destruction

• Allows you to choose “image” or OS family/version, and “hardware” (from list of available) or minimum CPU/RAM

• Uses underlying clouds’ APIs to find the right image/hardware for the given input







Single use slave

• The single use slave option lets you use a slave once and only once

• Slave is marked offline after job completes, guaranteeing the next time that job runs, it gets a fresh slave


Jenkins Instance Creation

• Create instances at beginning of build, tear down instances at end of build

• Use clouds and templates available as slaves

• Exposes IPs of instances to build steps

• Useful for testing clusters, etc


Building an app using CloudStack and jclouds


CloudCat

• Open source, Grails-based reporting and provisioning application for CloudStack

• github.com/abayer/cloudcat


Using Lower-Level API

• CloudStack admin information (accounts, hosts, etc) not available through jclouds standard API

• So we’ve got to use the CloudStack API itself - which we can do through jclouds!

• Same jclouds connection whether using standard API or CloudStack-specific



Mapping CloudStack Data

• jclouds has objects for data from CloudStack API

• VirtualMachine, Template, ServiceOffering, etc

• In CloudCat, we map those objects to Grails domain classes



Importing CloudStack data into Grails

• Run API commands as admin

• Persist results into database once an hour, rather than querying API live

• Pull credentials and endpoint from config domain object

• Use jclouds’ *Clients to get lists of hosts, templates, service offerings, instances



Associating templates, instances, etc

• We want to know how instances, templates, service offerings and hosts are related

• We want to keep historical information on instances, and know what instances were still existent the last time we got reported data



Alert Notification

• Email notification when CloudStack has problems - not available in CloudStack itself, so far as I can tell.

• Events and alerts are available from the API - check periodically for new alerts, send email when new ones are seen.



Alert Email ContentSaturday, December 1, 2012

Provisioning through CloudCat

• CloudStack UI for instance creation doesn’t make it easy to create a bunch of otherwise identical instances

• Hence, CloudCat provisioned instance groups


jclouds standard API or CloudStack-specific?

• jclouds provides instance creation in a standard way across all clouds, including CloudStack

• But the standard instance creation makes a lot of largely redundant API calls, especially to guarantee instance name uniqueness


jclouds standard API or CloudStack-specific?• We can guarantee uniqueness within

CloudCat

• Using lower level CloudStack API (still through jclouds) improves performance considerably

• Especially since we’re doing API calls as admin user


Speaking of accounts...

• How do we create instances for a logged-in user while making API calls as admin? Two options:

• Use account and domainid options for deployVirtualMachine

• Fetch account’s keys and make API call using those keys


Speaking of accounts...

• After experimentation, I went with using the logged-in user’s account’s keys

• Less API traffic when run as logged-in user


Grails

• Groovy

• Rails-like

• I’m lazy and bad with UIs, so I like getting sortable tables, MVC, and much more for free, with even more available from plugins!


So how does this all look?


Logged OutSaturday, December 1, 2012

Logged inSaturday, December 1, 2012

Instance ListingSaturday, December 1, 2012

Filtering InstancesSaturday, December 1, 2012

HostsSaturday, December 1, 2012

TemplatesSaturday, December 1, 2012

Create instancesSaturday, December 1, 2012

Instance StatusSaturday, December 1, 2012

Creation errorsSaturday, December 1, 2012

Creation successSaturday, December 1, 2012

Instance group listSaturday, December 1, 2012

Activity loggingSaturday, December 1, 2012

Known Issues

• I’m not a very good programmer!

• Only really tested with basic networking

• Init script requires hardcoded credentials on instances

• Needs work on packaging/installation

• Only one user so far!


More Information

• jclouds: http://jclouds.org

• jclouds Jenkins plugin: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/JClouds+Plugin

• CloudCat

• source: http://github.com/abayer/cloudcat

• demo: http://cloudcat.andrewbayer.com


http://jclouds.org

http://jclouds.org

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/JClouds+Plugin




http://github.com/abayer/cloudcat

http://github.com/abayer/cloudcat

http://cloudcat.andrewbayer.com

http://cloudcat.andrewbayer.com

Thank you!


Technology

CloudStack, jclouds, Jenkins and CloudCat