PE 2.0 » Cloud Provisioning » AWS Provisioning

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Provisioning With Amazon Web Services

Puppet Enterprise can create and manage EC2 machine instances using Amazon Web Services.

If you are new to Amazon Web Services, we recommend reading the Getting Started documentation.

Listing Amazon EC2 instances

Let’s start by listing our running EC2 instances. We do this by running the puppet node_aws list command.

$ puppet node_aws list
i-013eb462:
  created_at: Sat Nov 12 02:10:06 UTC 2011
  dns_name: ec2-107-22-110-102.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  id: i-013eb462
  state: running
i-019f0a62:
  created_at: Sat Nov 12 03:48:50 UTC 2011
  dns_name: ec2-50-16-145-167.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  id: i-019f0a62
  state: running
i-01a33662:
  created_at: Sat Nov 12 04:32:25 UTC 2011
  dns_name: ec2-107-22-79-148.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  id: i-01a33662
  state: running

Here we can see we’ve got three running EC2 instances and the following information has been returned:

The instance name
The date they were created on
The DNS host name of the instance
The ID of the instance
The state of the instance, for example running or terminated

If you have no instances running, then nothing will be returned.

Creating a new Amazon EC2 instance

You can create a new instance with the node_aws create action.

To create a new EC2 instance we need to add three required options:

The AMI image we wish to start.
The name of the SSH key pair to start the image with (see here for more about creating Amazon-managed key pairs).
The type of instance we wish to create. You can see a list of types here.

Let’s provide this information and run the command:

$ puppet node_aws create --image ami-edae6384 --keyname cloudprovisioner --type m1.small
notice: Creating new instance ...
notice: Creating new instance ... Done
notice: Creating tags for instance ...
notice: Creating tags for instance ... Done
notice: Launching server i-df7ee898 ...
##################
notice: Server i-df7ee898 is now launched
notice: Server i-df7ee898 public dns name: ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com
ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com

We’ve created a new instance using an AMI of ami-edae6384, a key named cloudprovisioner and of the type m1.small. If you’ve forgotten the available key names on your account, you can get a list with the node_aws list_keynames action:

$ puppet node_aws list_keynames
cloudprovisioner (ad:d4:04:9f:b0:8d:e5:4e:4c:46:00:bf:88:4f:b6:c2:a1:b4:af:56)

You can also specify a variety of other options, including the region to start the instance in, and you can see a full list of these options by running puppet help node_aws create.

After the instance has been created, the public DNS name of the instance will be returned. In this case: ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com.

Connecting to an EC2 instance

Once you’ve created an EC2 instance you can then connect to it using SSH. To do this we need the private key we downloaded earlier from the Amazon Web Services console. Add this key to your local SSH configuration, usually in the .ssh directory.

$ cp mykey.pem ~/.ssh/mykey.pem

Ensure the .ssh directory and the key have appropriate permissions.

$ chmod 0700 ~/.ssh
$ chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/mykey.pem

We can now use this key to connect to our new instance.

$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pem [email protected]

Terminating an EC2 instance

Once you’ve finished with an EC2 instance you can easily terminate it. Terminating an instance destroys the instance entirely and is a destructive action that should only be performed when you’ve finished with the instance. To terminate an instance, use the node_aws terminate action.

$ puppet node_aws terminate ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com
notice: Destroying i-df7ee898 (ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com) ...
notice: Destroying i-df7ee898 (ec2-50-18-93-82.us-east-1.compute.amazonaws.com) ... Done

Getting more help

The puppet node_aws command has extensive in-line help documentation and a man page.

To see the available actions and command line options, run:

$ puppet help node_aws
USAGE: puppet node_aws <action>

This subcommand provides a command line interface to work with Amazon EC2
machine instances.  The goal of these actions are to easily create new
machines, install Puppet onto them, and tear them down when they're no longer
required.

OPTIONS:
  --mode MODE                    - The run mode to use (user, agent, or master).
  --render-as FORMAT             - The rendering format to use.
  --verbose                      - Whether to log verbosely.
  --debug                        - Whether to log debug information.

ACTIONS:
  bootstrap        Create and initialize an EC2 instance using Puppet
  create           Create a new EC2 machine instance.
  fingerprint      Make a best effort to securely obtain the SSH host key
                   fingerprint
  list             List AWS EC2 node instances
  list_keynames    List available AWS EC2 key names
  terminate        Terminate an EC2 machine instance

See 'puppet man node_aws' or 'man puppet-node_aws' for full help.

You can also view the man page for more detailed help.

$ puppet man node_aws

You can get help on individual actions by running:

$ puppet help node_aws <ACTION>

For example,

$ puppet help node_aws list