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Juju SoftLayer Provider

doc/softlayer.png

This package provides a cli plugin for juju that allows for automated provisioning of virtual/cloud machines on softlayer.

Softlayer is premium hosting provider offering both bare metal and xen based cloud instances with a myriad of configuration options across multiple data center with monthly and hourly billing.

Juju provides for workloads management and orchestration using a collection of workloads definitions (charms) that can be assembled lego fashion at runtime into complex application topologies.

You can find out more about juju at its home page. http://juju.ubuntu.com

Install

This plugin requires version of recent juju (>= 1.18)

A suitable version is distributed for trusty (14.04) for older versions of ubuntu the latest stable release are available from a ppa:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juju/stable
$ apt-get update && apt-get install juju
$ juju version
1.18.0-saucy-amd64

Plugin installation is done via pip/easy_install which is the python language package managers, its available by default on ubuntu. Also recommended is virtualenv to sandbox this install from your system packages:

$ pip install -U juju-slayer

Fwiw, currently the transitive dependency tree is PyYAML, requests, softlayer.

Setup

There are three steps for configuration and setup of this provider. Configuring your softlayer api keys, adding an environment to juju's config file, and setting up an ssh key for usage on softlayer machines.

SoftLayer API Keys

A SoftLayer account is a pre-requisite, If you don't have a Softlayer account you can sign up here.

Credentials for the softlayer api can be obtained from your account dashboard at https://manage.softlayer.com/Administrative/apiKeychain

The credentials can be provided to the plugin via env variable or via the sl cli's config

  • Environment variables SL_API_KEY and SL_USERNAME

This softlayer plugin uses the manual provisioning capabilities of juju core. As a result its required to allocate machines in the environment before deploying workloads. We'll explore that more in a moment.

SSH Key

An ssh key is required for use by this plugin and the public key must be uploaded to the softlayer control panel, alternatively you can upload it directly using the sl cli program (installed automatically as a pre-requisite of this plugin):

$ sl sshkey add $USER-key -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Keys can be verified with:

$ sl sshkey list

By default all keys in the softlayer account will be added to launched nodes, so no explict user configuration is needed. A specific key to utilize can be specified with the environment variable SL_SSH_KEY="key_spec" where key_spec is either the id of the key in the from the command line, or the name of the key as found in softlayer control panel (https://manage.softlayer.com/Security/sshKeys)

Juju Config

Next let's configure a juju environment for soft laayer, add an a null provider environment to 'environments.yaml', for example:

environments:
  softlayer:
     type: manual
     bootstrap-host: null
     bootstrap-user: root

Usage

We need to tell juju which environment we want to use, there are several ways to do this, either of the following will do the trick:

$ juju switch softlayer
$ export JUJU_ENV=softlayer

Now we can bootstrap our softlayer environment:

$ juju sl bootstrap --constraints="mem=2g, region=sjc"

Which will create a machine with 2Gb of ram in the san jose data center.

All machines created by this plugin will have the juju environment name as a prefix for their hostname if your looking at the softlayer control panel and a suffix/domain of juju.ubuntu.

After our environment is bootstrapped we can add additional machines to it via the the add-machine command, for example the following will add 3 machines with 2Gb each:

$ juju sl add-machine -n 2 --constraints="mem=2G, region=sjc"
$ juju status

environment: softlayer
machines:
  "0":
    agent-state: started
    agent-version: 1.18.0.1
    dns-name: 162.243.115.78
    instance-id: 'manual:'
    series: precise
    hardware: arch=amd64 cpu-cores=1 mem=2002M
  "1":
    agent-state: started
    agent-version: 1.18.0.1
    dns-name: 162.243.86.238
    instance-id: manual:162.243.86.238
    series: precise
    hardware: arch=amd64 cpu-cores=1 mem=2002M
  "2":
    agent-state: started
    agent-version: 1.18.0.1
    dns-name: 107.170.39.10
    instance-id: manual:107.170.39.10
    series: precise
    hardware: arch=amd64 cpu-cores=1 mem=2002M
services: {}

We can now use standard juju commands for deploying service workloads aka charms:

$ juju deploy wordpress

Without specifying the machine to place the workload on, the machine will automatically go to an unused machine within the environment.

There are hundreds of available charms ready to be used, you can find out more about what's out there from http://jujucharms.com Or alternatively the 'plain' html version at http://manage.jujucharms.com/charms/precise

We can use manual placement to deploy target particular machines:

$ juju deploy mysql --to=2

And of course the real magic of juju comes in its ability to assemble these workloads together via relations like lego blocks:

$ juju add-relation wordpress mysql

We can terminate allocated machines by their machine id. By default with the softlayer plugin, machines are forcibly terminated which will also terminate any service units on those machines:

$ juju sl terminate-machine 1 2

And we can destroy the entire environment via:

$ juju sl destroy-environment

All commands have builtin help facilities and accept a -v option which will print verbose output while running.

You can find out more about using from http://juju.ubuntu.com/docs

Constraints

Constraints are selection criteria used to determine what type of machine to allocate for an environment. Those criteria can be related to size of the machine, its location, or other provider specific criteria.

This plugin accepts the standard juju constraints

  • cpu-cores
  • memory
  • root-disk

Additionally it supports the following provider specific constraints.

  • 'region' to denote one softlayer's data center to utilize. All softlayer data centers are supported and various short hand aliases are defined. ie. valid values include ams01, dal01, dal05, dal06, sea01, sng01, sjc01, wdc01. The plugin defaults to leaving it empty which auto selects first available.