Background
Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that their CodeDeploy service supports on-premise instances. This is extremely valuable – especially for developers and administrators to allow utilization of existing on-premise resources.
For teams who are using HP Helion Eucalyptus 4.1 (or who want to use Eucalyptus), this is even better news. This feature – along with HP Helion Eucalyptus 4.1 Cloudformation – developers can deploy applications within a private cloud environment of HP Helion Eucalyptus. This makes it even easier for developers and administrators to separate out and maintain production (AWS) versus development (HP Helion Eucalyptus) environments (or vice versa). In addition, since HP Helion Eucalyptus strives for AWS compatibility, the Cloudformation templates used on Eucalyptus, can be used with AWS – with just a couple of modifications.
The Setup
To leverage on-premise instances with AWS CodeDeploy, please reference the AWS documentation entitled “Configure Existing On-Premises Instances by Using AWS CodeDeploy“. To use these steps with an HP Helion Eucalyptus cloud, a slight change had to be done to the AWS CLI tools. When using the ‘aws deploy register’ command, AWS CLI checks to see if the instance is running on an AWS environment by confirm if the instance metadata is present. For on-premise cloud environments that provide the same service, this will cause the on-premise instance registration to fail. To resolve this issue, I updated the AWS CLI tools with a patch that checks the instance metadata variable ‘AMI ID’ – which on AWS will begin with ‘ami’. All images on Eucalyptus start with ’emi’ (i.e. Eucalyptus Machine Images). With this patch, on-premise instance registration completes without a problem.
In addition to the patch, the following is needed on HP Helion Eucalyptus 4.1 cloud environments:
- A Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS EMI (EBS-backed or Instance Store-Backed)
- Eucalyptus IAM access policy actions that allow the user to use CloudFormations, AutoScaling and EC2 actions. (Along with the Eucalyptus documentation, reference the AWS IAM documentation as well.)
Once these requirements have been met on the HP Helion Eucalyptus 4.1 environment, developers can use their AWS credentials in the Eucalyptus Cloudformation templates to leverage the on-premise instances with AWS CodeDeploy.
Using Eucalyptus Cloudformation For Instance Deployment
To help get started, I provided the following example Cloudformation templates:
Each template has specific parameters that need values. The key parameters are the following:
- UserKeyPair -> Eucalyptus EC2 Key Pair
- UbuntuImageId -> Ubuntu 14.04 Cloud Image (EMI)
- SSHLocation -> IP address range that can SSH into the Eucalyptus instances
Once there are values for these parameters, the Cloudformation templates can be utilized to deploy the on-premise instances.
Configure Existing On-Premises Instances by Using AWS CodeDeploy
After the AWS IAM prerequisites have been met for AWS CodeDeploy, use the example Cloudformation templates with HP Helion Eucalyptus. Below is an example output of both templates being used on a given HP Helion Eucalyptus 4.1 cloud:
# euform-describe-stacks --region account2-admin@eucalyptus-cloud STACK UbuntuCodeDeployTest CREATE_COMPLETE Complete! Eucalyptus Cloudformation Example => Deploy an instance that is configured and registered as an on-premise instance with AWS CodeDeploy 2015-04-14T02:42:01.325Z PARAMETER UbuntuImageId emi-759e12a3 PARAMETER UserKeyPair account2-admin OUTPUT InstanceId i-df9af6f5 OUTPUT AZ thugmotivation101 OUTPUT PublicIP 10.111.75.103 STACK UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest CREATE_COMPLETE Complete! Eucalyptus CloudFormation Sample Template AutoScaling-Single AZ for AWS CodeDeploy on-premise instances. The autoscaling group is configured to span in one availability zone (one cluster) and is Auto-Scaled based on the CPU utilization of the servers. In addition, each instance will be registered as an on-premise instance with AWS CodeDeploy. Please refer to http://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/how-to-configure-on-premises-host.html for additional information. 2015-04-14T02:41:44.733Z PARAMETER InstanceType m1.xlarge PARAMETER UbuntuImageId emi-759e12a3 PARAMETER UserKeyPair account2-admin PARAMETER MinSize 2 PARAMETER MaxSize 4 PARAMETER Zone theinspiration OUTPUT AutoScalingGroup UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest-ServerGroup-211FTERKLII6T
Since both Eucalyptus Cloudformation stacks have successfully deployed, let’s check out the instances:
# euca-describe-instances --region account2-admin@eucalyptus-cloud RESERVATION r-feeb1023 968367465792 UbuntuCodeDeployTest-CodeDeploySecurityGroup-HP5L5HRU3WI98 INSTANCE i-df9af6f5 emi-759e12a3 euca-10-111-75-103.eucalyptus.a-35.autoqa.qa1.eucalyptus-systems.com euca-10-111-75-107.eucalyptus.internal running account2-admin 0 m1.xlarge 2015-04-14T02:42:11.346Z thugmotivation101 monitoring-disabled 10.111.75.103 10.111.75.107 instance-store hvm sg-422ed69a x86_64 TAG instance i-df9af6f5 aws:cloudformation:logical-id CodeDeployInstance TAG instance i-df9af6f5 aws:cloudformation:stack-id arn:aws:cloudformation::968367465792:stack/UbuntuCodeDeployTest/b210c81a-7e34-476f-9c59-7ea69ac9647a TAG instance i-df9af6f5 aws:cloudformation:stack-name UbuntuCodeDeployTest RESERVATION r-10df526e 968367465792 UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest-InstanceSecurityGroup-B2OVH0XWAFN5S INSTANCE i-9b2b14e3 emi-759e12a3 euca-10-111-75-97.eucalyptus.a-35.autoqa.qa1.eucalyptus-systems.com euca-10-111-75-106.eucalyptus.internal running account2-admin 0 m1.xlarge 2015-04-14T02:42:05.939Z theinspiration monitoring-enabled 10.111.75.97 10.111.75.106 instance-store hvm d739a9eb-ba3c-4f16-940c-366a516cebfe_theinspiration_1 sg-556b10ce x86_64 TAG instance i-9b2b14e3 Name UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest TAG instance i-9b2b14e3 aws:autoscaling:groupName UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest-ServerGroup-211FTERKLII6T TAG instance i-9b2b14e3 aws:cloudformation:logical-id ServerGroup TAG instance i-9b2b14e3 aws:cloudformation:stack-id arn:aws:cloudformation::968367465792:stack/UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest/2a5aefc6-c5c3-41e8-a9b4-a9ca095c1696 TAG instance i-9b2b14e3 aws:cloudformation:stack-name UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest RESERVATION r-6c8a9642 968367465792 UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest-InstanceSecurityGroup-B2OVH0XWAFN5S INSTANCE i-12f1a3a3 emi-759e12a3 euca-10-111-75-101.eucalyptus.a-35.autoqa.qa1.eucalyptus-systems.com euca-10-111-75-111.eucalyptus.internal running account2-admin 0 m1.xlarge 2015-04-14T02:42:05.872Z theinspiration monitoring-enabled 10.111.75.101 10.111.75.111 instance-store hvm 16a61ee7-d143-4f08-b926-c711ce335a1a_theinspiration_1 sg-556b10ce x86_64 TAG instance i-12f1a3a3 Name UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest TAG instance i-12f1a3a3 aws:autoscaling:groupName UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest-ServerGroup-211FTERKLII6T TAG instance i-12f1a3a3 aws:cloudformation:logical-id ServerGroup TAG instance i-12f1a3a3 aws:cloudformation:stack-id arn:aws:cloudformation::968367465792:stack/UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest/2a5aefc6-c5c3-41e8-a9b4-a9ca095c1696 TAG instance i-12f1a3a3 aws:cloudformation:stack-name UbuntuCodeDeployAutoScalingTest
As we can see above, the Eucalyptus Cloudformation instances are tagged just as if they were running on AWS – again demonstrating the AWS compatibility desired by HP Helion Eucalyptus.
Now, look in the AWS Management Console, under the AWS CodeDeploy service. In the dropbox under ‘AWS CodeDeploy’, select ‘On-Premise Instances':
Once that has been selected, the on-premise instances running on HP Helion Eucalyptus should show up as ‘Registered':
Now developers can proceed with remaining steps of using AWS CodeDeploy to do an application deployment.
Conclusion
As demonstrated, the new feature in AWS CodeDeploy allows developers to gain a true sense of a hybrid cloud environment. This feature – along with HP Helion Eucalyptus’s AWS compatibility – makes it easy for developers and administrators to use the same toolset to deploy, manage and maintain both public and private cloud environments. Don’t forget – using AWS CodeDeploy with on-premise instances does have an AWS pricing cost associated with it. Check out AWS CodeDeploy Pricing for more details.
Enjoy!
Filed under: Infrastructure, Private Cloud Computing, System Adminstration Tagged: ami, autoscaling, aws codedeploy on-premise instances, cloud computing, cloudformation, eucalyptus 4.1, hp helion eucalyptus, hybrid cloud, IAM, ubuntu cloud images, userdata
