Talk presented at PuppetCamp Boston 2013, just before Red Hat Summit.

1. Infrastructure as code with
Puppet and Apache CloudStack
David Nalley
ke4qqq@apache.org
@ke4qqq

2. #whoami
• Apache Software Foundation Member
• Apache CloudStack PMC Member
• Recovering Sysadmin
• Fedora Project Contributor
• Zenoss contributor
• Employed by Citrix in the Open Source Business Office

3. Setting the stage
Apache CloudStack is...
● an open source IaaS platform
● proven in production at massive scale
● awesome

4. Gorgeous UI

5. API
● Native: http://cloudstack.apache.org/docs/api
● EC2

6. IaaS removes one constraint
No longer waiting days or weeks to get a VM provisioned

7. but introduces another...
Now you have to get a machine configured in a timely
manner.

8. Self service
● UI
● API
● Some external tool

9. People provision stuff...
Not ops folks
Often not familiar with environmental intricacies
Don't care

10. Baseline can be important....

11. Classification
Problem: We spin up, dynamically, 1-500 VMs at any given time - how do
we decide what configurations apply.

12. Classification
The wrong way - dedicated images for each purpose

13. Classification
editing nodes.pp
node 'foo-356.cloud.com' {
include httpd
}

14. Classification
globbing
node 'mysql*' {
include mysqld
}

15. Classification
Everything is default
node 'default' {
include httpd
}

16. Classification
External Node Classifier

17. Classification
External Node Classifier

18. Classification
Facts
class base {
case $::fact {
'httpd': {
include httpd
}
'otherrole': {
include nginx
}
}
}

19. Classification - One Solution
● During instance provisioning define metadata.
● Custom fact for that metadata
● Case statement based on that fact

20. Example Metadata
role=webserver
location=datacenter1
environment=production

21. Corresponding manifest
class base {
case $::fact {
'webserver': {
include httpd
}
'database': {
include postgresql
}
}
}

22. Corresponding manifest
class base {
case $::fact {
'webserver': {
include httpd
}
'database': {
include postgresql
}
}
}

23. Links, et al.
● Fact:
http://s.apache.org/acs_userdata
● Blog with details:
http://s.apache.org/acs_userdata2

24. Video - go watch it
● I only have 45 minutes - so can't delve
into everything, you should watch the
video- it’s great.
● http://youtu.be/c8YWctfOpwo

25. Video - go watch it
● I only have 45 minutes - so can't delve
into everything, you should watch the
video- it’s great.
● http://youtu.be/c8YWctfOpwo

26. And then there was a knife-plugin
The folks at Edmunds.com wrote a knife plugin for
CloudStack
The knife plugin had the ability to define an application
stack, potentially hundreds of nodes, that are interrelated,
and provision them with a single knife command.
https://github.com/cloudstack-extras/knife-cloudstack

27. Deploying a machine with knife
~ knife cs server create

28. {
"name": "hadoop_cluster_a",
"description": "A small hadoop cluster with hbase",
"version": "1.0",
"environment": "production",
"servers": [
{
"name": "zookeeper-a, zookeeper-b, zookeeper-c",
"description": "Zookeeper nodes",
"template": "rhel-5.6-base",
"service": "small",
"port_rules": "2181",
"run_list": "role[cluster_a], role[zookeeper_server]",
"actions": [
{ "knife_ssh": ["role:zookeeper_server", "sudo chef-client"] }
]
},
{
"name": "hadoop-master",
"description": "Hadoop master node",
"template": "rhel-5.6-base",
"service": "large",
"networks": "app-net, storage-net",
"port_rules": "50070, 50030, 60010",
"run_list": "role[cluster_a], role[hadoop_master], role[hbase_master]"
},
{
"name": "hadoop-worker-a hadoop-worker-b hadoop-worker-c",
"description": "Hadoop worker nodes",
"template": "rhel-5.6-base",
"service": "medium",
"port_rules": "50075, 50060, 60030",
"run_list": "role[cluster_a], role[hadoop_worker], role[hbase_regionserver]",
"actions": [
{ "knife_ssh": ["role:hadoop_master", "sudo chef-client"] },
{ "http_request": "http://${hadoop-master}:50070/index.jsp" }
]
}
}

29. Deploy that Hadoop cluster with
knife cs stack create hadoop_cluster_a

30. I was jealous....

31. Then at FOSDEM 2012
● CloudStack user shows me Puppet types and resources
for OpenNebula.
● https://puppetlabs.com/blog/puppetizing-opennebula/
● They indicated they wanted this awesomeness for
CloudStack....

32. Why?
● They wanted to define each of their application
stacks in puppet, so that not only the configuration
of software on the machine, but the machines
themselves would be configured by Puppet.
● Automated deployment of test environments that
are exactly the same
● Really gets outside of machine configuration to
entire infrastructure configuration

33. What we are used to
● Puppet _defines_ the configuration
within the machine

34. What we want
● Puppet _defines_ the machine.
● Puppet _defines_ collection of
machines
● Puppet _defines_ the machines,
networks, and rest of infrastructure

35. Then at Puppetconf
● There was Google Compute
Engine types and resources for
Puppet.
● Dan Bode gave a presentation showing off the work he
had done... that presentation is worth seeing...
● http://www.slideshare.net/bodepd/google-compute-presentati

37. And then for Christmas
● puppet types and providers arrived - courtesy of Dan
Bode
● https://github.com/bodepd/cloudstack_resource
s

38. How does this work?
cloudstack_instance { 'foo1':
ensure => present,
flavor => 'Small Instance',
zone => 'FMT-ACS-001',
image => 'CentOS 5.6(64-bit) no GUI
(XenServer)',
network => 'puppetlabs-network',
# domain
# account
# hostname
}
●

39. Setting defaults
Cloudstack_instance {
image => 'CentOS 6.3',
flavor => 'M1.medium',
zone => 'San Jose',
network => 'davids_net',
keypair => 'david_keys',
}
cloudstack_instance {
ensure => $::ensure,
group => 'role=db',
}

40. A simple stack
class my_web_stack {
cloudstack_instance { 'foo4':
ensure => present,
group => 'role=apache',
}
cloudstack_instance { 'foo5':
ensure => present,
group => 'role=db',
}
}

41. Questions

42. Contact
● Project
– http://cloudstack.apache.org
– #cloudstack on irc.freenode.net
● Me
– ke4qqq on irc.freenode.net
– ke4qqq@apache.org