Web version : http://www.logilab.org/ At Logilab we are big fans of SaltStack, we use it quite extensively to centralize, configure and automate deployments. We've talked on our blog about how to build a debian AMI "by hand" http://www.logilab.org/ fully. Hence the salt way seemed to be the obvious way to go. So we wrote salt-ami-cloud-builder. It is mainly glue between existing pieces of software that we use and like. If you already have some definition of a type of host that you provision using salt-stack, salt-ami-cloud-builder should be able to generate the corresponding AMI. Why ------ Building a Debian based OpenStack private cloud using salt made us realize that we needed a way to generate various flavours of AMIs for the following reasons: * Some of our openstack users need "preconfigured" AMIs (for example a Debian system with Postgres 9.1 and the appropriate Python bindings) without doing the modifications by hand or waiting for an automated script to do the job at AMI boot time. * Some cloud use cases require that you boot many (hundreds for instance) machines with the same configuration. While tools like salt automate the job, waiting while the same download and install takes place hundreds of times is a waste of resources. If the modifications have already been integrated into a specialized ami, you save a lot of computing time. And especially in the amazon (or other pay-per-use cloud infrastructures), these resources are not free. * Sometimes one needs to repeat a computation on an instance with the very same packages and input files, possibly years after the first run. Freezing packages and files in one preconfigured AMI helps this a lot. When relying only on a salt configuration the installed packages may not be (exactly) the same from one run to the other. Get it now ! ---------------- Grab the code here: http://hg.logilab.org/master/ The project page is http://www.logilab.org/ The docs can be read here: http://docs.logilab.org/salt- We hope you find it useful. Bug reports and contributions are welcome. The logilab-salt-ami-cloud-builder team. -- Paul tonelli paul.tonelli@logilab.fr |