Eucalyptus Recipes Project

Automation and configuration management is a big part of any successful cloud deployment. Whether on AWS, Eucalyptus or another cloud provider, having services that can be easily spun up and down with a consistent configuration is a must at cloud scale. The recipes project is looking to assist new cloud users with a first step.

The recipes project is attempting to be as vendor agnostic as possible by using both Puppet and Chef with the possible expansion to more options (Fabric, Ansible, etc) in the future. The project will be showing users basic techniques to get started with configuration management once their cloud is up and running. The project will also attempt to tie in the plentiful resources already available from these vibrant communities to extend the flexibility of deployments.

To help users with this a repository on GitHub has been created. The simple structure will help users choose which solution they want to use easily (or why not try all of them?). The repository contains scripts to take you automatically from a bare instance to having the puppet agent or chef-solo installed and ready to go (Note: These original bootstrap scripts were taken from my earlier posts here and here for automating a puppet and chef installation respectively). After this you’ll also be able to use some of our pre-built puppet modules or chef cookbooks to get started with basic configuration management in the cloud.

The basic structure for the repo will look like the following:

|- bootstrap
  \- puppet
    \- debian
    |- centos
    |- rhel
    |- ubuntu
  |- chef
    \- debian
    |- centos
    |- rhel
    |- ubuntu
|- puppet
  \- apache
    \- manifests
      \- init.pp
    |- files
    |- templates
  |- nginx
|- chef
  \- apache
    \- recipes
    |- files
    |- templates
    |- definitions
    |- attributes
  |- nginx
    \- recipes
    |- files
    |- templates
    |- definitions
    |- attributes

As you can see, it will be easy to find the script or set of modules you are looking for. The bootstrap folder will take care of automating the installation of any clients that might be needed for the various configuration management tools. Each configuration management tool will have a directory containing basic setups that new users can use to setup basic services. The recipes project is only looking to give some basic examples (at least at the start) so you can easily run a git clone inside of your instance and have the entire repo for usage in little time.

If you are interested in the project then come check us out! Let us know what you would like to see from us to make getting started with configuration management in Eucalyptus easier for you.We have a weekly meeting on irc.freenode.net in #eucalyptus-meeting at 11:30 PT. You can also reach us check out the Eucalyptus community mailing list for updates from time to time.