CloudStack, jclouds, Jenkins and CloudCat

CloudStack and jclouds
Andrew 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 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


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 Content

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 Out

Logged in

Instance Listing

Filtering Instances

Hosts

Templates

Create instances

Instance Status

Creation errors

Creation success

Instance group list

Activity logging

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

Thank you!


CloudStack, jclouds, Jenkins and CloudCat

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