My name is Rich Jerrido and I am the person behind 
How to leverage cloud computing assets via apache-libcloud
December 13th, 2010 by RichJ received No Comments »
They say that necessity is the mother of all invention. I would like to go on record as saying that if that is true, then laziness must be his father. Frequently, I have a requirement to spin up a machine or two (or a hundred) in “the cloud” to play around with, test something out, or even support some of my $DAYJOB obligations. And why do it by hand if it can be scripted. As the wonderful world of cloud computing is so fluid and dynamic, with so many providers coming online, I don’t want to code up something that is provider-specific and then have to toss (most of) it away to work with another provider. Enter Apache libcloud, which is a library for interfacing with various cloud providers. The libcloud project has bindings in Java and Python (woohoo!!!), and all that is needed is a username and password/API key with the cloud provider. I put together the following script to spin up instances in RackSpace’s cloud. It can be very easily adapted to support any other (or multiple) cloud providers. The latest version of this script can be found on my GitHub account.
rackspace.py
# rackspace.py - Script to spin up virtual instances in RackSpace's cloud
# Author: Rich Jerrido (richard.w.jerrido@outsidaz.org)
# License: GPLv2
# Requires:
# - Python
# - Apache libcloud (http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/)
# - A RackSpace cloud account
# - A RackSpace API Key
# Todos:
# - Add better exception handling
#
import sys, getpass
from libcloud.types import Provider
from libcloud.providers import get_driver
from optparse import OptionParser
use = "Usage: %prog [options] argument1"
parser = OptionParser(usage = use)
parser.add_option("-n", "--name", action="store", type="string", dest="name",
default=False, help="Cloud Instance Name")
parser.add_option("-u", "--user", action="store", type="string", dest="user",
default=False, help="RackSpace Username")
parser.add_option("-k", "--key", action="store", type="string", dest="key",
default=False, help="RackSpace API Key (Will prompt if omitted)")
parser.add_option("-s", "--size", action="store", type="string", dest="size",
default=False, help="RackSpace Instance Size")
parser.add_option("-i", "--image", action="store", type="string", dest="image",
default=False, help="RackSpace Image Name")
options, args = parser.parse_args()
if not ( options.name and options.user and options.size and options.image):
print "You must specify the name, user, size and image options"
parser.print_help()
print "\n\n Example Usage: ./rackspace.py -n testmachine -u rjerrido -k 1111222233334444 -i rhel5u5-x86-64 -s 256"
sys.exit()
else:
NAME = options.name
RACK_USER = options.user
if not (options.key):
RACK_API_KEY = getpass.getpass("Enter RackSpace API KEY: ")
else:
RACK_API_KEY = options.key
Driver = get_driver(Provider.RACKSPACE)
conn = Driver(RACK_USER, RACK_API_KEY)
images = conn.list_images()
sizes = conn.list_sizes()
IMAGE = [i for i in images if i.name.find(options.image) != -1]
SIZE = [i for i in sizes if i.name.find(options.size) != -1]
node = conn.create_node(name=NAME, image=IMAGE[0], size=SIZE[0])
Usage:
Download, make executable, and run
-k 1111222233334444 -i rhel5u5-x86-64 -s 256"
Substituting your username / API Key as appropriate.
Posted under: Linux, Linux - CentOS, Linux - Fedora, Linux - Red Hat, Python, Windows
