PoolParty

DESCRIPTION:

PoolParty makes cloud provisioning and management easy. PoolParty provides a unified interface for provisioning, management and cloud life-cycle on many different cloud providers, such as EC2 and vmware.

Code your cloud!

SYNOPSIS:

PoolParty is written with the intention of being as application-agnostic as possible. It installs only the basic required software to glue the cloud together on the instances as listed below.

Quickstart

For instance, to start a basic cloud, let’s write one:

pool "demo" do
  cloud "app" do
    instances 2..10
    keypair "cloud_demo"

    using :ec2

    has_file "/etc/motd", :content => "Hello from your cloud"
  end
end

Simply by issuing the command:

cloud start

The app cloud in the demo pool will be started, bootstrapped and provisioned to your liking. If the platform is not specified, then it’s assumed to be ubuntu. However, if a node is running, then PoolParty will introspect the node and determine the operating system. This can be specified in the clouds.rb.

There are a number of commands PoolParty offers to interact with your cloud. They include:

cloud start
cloud terminate
cloud bootstrap
cloud configure
cloud compile
cloud console
cloud expand
cloud contract
cloud list
cloud show
cloud ssh

There is also a helper installer script. This is an easy way to get started bootstrapping your environment:

install-poolparty

We can change the cloud provider simply by changing the using line. For instance:

pool "demo" do
  cloud "app" do
    #...
    using :rackspace # coming soon
    #...

Clouds are distinguished by keypairs, so to create multiple clouds, create a new keypair. For instance:

pool "demo" do
  cloud "app" do
    keypair "demo_app"
    #...
  end
  cloud "db" do
    keypair "demo_db"
    #...
  end
end

Resources

As you probably noticed from above, you provision your system with resources. There are native resources, plugins (which are basically resources) and you can write your own. The base resources included in PoolParty are as follows:

file
directory
exec
variable
service
package
user
group
link (symlink)
line (line in file)
gem_package
cron

There are also dependency_resolver specific resources. For instance, chef specific resources are as follows:

chef_attribute
http_request
remote_directory
remote_file
route
script

To use these resources in your config file (clouds.rb), simply “assert” (call) the method with has_ or does_not_have prepended. For instance:

pool "demo" do
  cloud "app" do
    has_file "/etc/motd", :requires => get_package("apache2")
    has_package "apache2" do
      action :install
    end
  end
end

As you can see, there are many different ways to call a resource. All the following resource calls are identical:

has_file "/etc/motd", :content => "Hello world", :owner => "ari"
has_file :name => "/etc/motd", :content => "Hello world", :owner => "ari"
has_file "/etc/motd" do
  content "Hello world"
  owner "ari"
end
has_file "/etc/motd", :content => "Hello world" do
  owner "ari"
end

All resources can contain their own resources as well. This sets up a dependency on the parent dependency. For instance

has_directory "/etc/configs" do
  has_file "/etc/configs/configger", :content => "Stuff"
end

This says that the directory must exist before the file can be created.

You can see the dependency graph setup by your clouds.rb by calling

cloud compile -g output

That will generate a output.dot and output.png in the current directory. For this to work, you must have dot installed. Try it!

Resources can be built on top of other resources as well. This is the definition of a resource plugin. This is covered more in-depth on the homepage. For the curious, take a look at lib/poolparty/plugins/apache.rb for an example plugin.

There are currently several plugins that ship with PoolParty. Those include:

apache (this includes passenger, virtual_hosts, php5)
git
rails

This is list likely to expand as plugins are simply resources built on top of other resources. There is an external project called poolparty-extensions (<a href=“github.com/auser/poolparty-extensions/tree/master”>github.com/auser/poolparty-extensions/tree/master</a>) that has quite a few external plugins, including hadoop, ganglia and more.

Extending

To add a cloud_provider, there are four methods that need to be implemented. Simply sublcass the CloudProviders module and require it in your clouds.rb (or commit it back to PoolParty). Those four methods are:

run_instance
terminate_instance
describe_instances
describe_instance

That’s it!

Each resource is documented in the code and more documentation can be found at the site: <a href=“poolpartyrb.com”>poolpartyrb.com</a>.

FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

Written in Ruby and Erlang (Internal node communication handled by <a href=“github.com/auser/hermes/tree/master”>Hermes</a>)
Thrift interface (Connect to your cloud in ANY language supported by <a href=“incubator.apache.org/thrift/”>Thrift</a>)
Written from the ground up to be extensible with plugins
Easy git-style commands to communicate with your clouds
Much much more

REQUIREMENTS:

Ruby
Erlang

INSTALL:

sudo gem install auser-poolparty

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.