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Amazon EC2 is a cloud computing service provided by Amazon.com.
Amazon already provides a set of tools to manage EC2 resources. They allow stopping/starting instances, allocating ip addresses and volumes, attaching volumes etc.The problem is , when one starts using the tools to manage day-to-day operations like starting/stopping servers, it becomes clear that the Amazon tools are too fine-grained therefore not very productive.
For instance, starting a server involves calling many different tools: one for running the server instance, one for assigining ip addresses, one to attach EBS volumes etc.Of course one can script this operation, but it is not as easy as it seems: all EC2 operations are asynchronous, which means requests return immediately but may take effect at some point in the future. So at the end shell scripts that use Amazon command-line tools end up very long and complicated and, worse of all, unreliable.Another problem with the command line tools provided by Amazon is that there is no way to label your EC2 objects (instances, volumes, snapshots etc). You have to deal with object ids, which are not intended to be human-readable ( like i-c4c026ac or vol-a5d83ecc)
RainToolkit solves all that by providing a set of command line tools based on the concept of virtual machine, a concept familiar to anyone who has used any virtualization software (VirtualBox, VMWare etc.). The RainToolkit commands allow you to manipulate virtual machines and its attachable components (volumes and elastic IP addresses).
Data for virtual machine and volume configuration is stored in Amazon Simple DB.
Rain toolkit operates on the basic concept of a Virtual Machine (VM). A VM is a set of related EC2 resources (machine image, elastic ip address, volumes etc.) that for administrative purposes is managed as a unit.
A VM has a name and when it is running it also has an associated EC2 instance id. All operations refer to the VM by name.
Rain Toolkit also enables naming of EBS Volumes. Volume operations can refer to the volume name or to the EC2 volume id.
The most recent RainToolkit distribution can be downloaded from the toolkit web page (http://www.logicstyle.com/raintoolkit.html). The toolkit will work on any Unix-like operating system which has Java 6 installed.(Windows support is forthcoming).
Make sure the java executable can be located in the command path:
java -version java version "1.6.0_17"Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b04-248-10M3025)Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 14.3-b01-101, mixed mode)
Unzip the distribution file in a directory of your choice. Before the toolkit can be use a few environment variables need to be set:
You will also need to make a copy of your AWS ssh access keys to the directory $RAIN_HOME/keys, with the name '<key name>.identity'. For instance, if you have a keypair called 'gsg-keypair' you need to save its private key ot the keys directory with the name 'gsg-keypair.identity'
You can test the installation as follows:
export RAIN_HOME=<install dir> export AWS_ACCESS_ID=<your aws access id> export AWS_SECRET_KEY=<your aws secret key> cd $RAIN_HOME ./bin/describe-virtual-machines
You can create virtual machines with the create-virtual-machine command. It accepts the following arguments:
-name (-n) [String] Virtual machine name -newName [String] New name -image (-i) [String] Virtual machine image id -availbilityZone (-z) [String] Availability zone -groups (-g) [String[,]] Virtual machine security groups, comma-separated -kernel (-k) [String] Kernel id -ramDisk (-r) [String] Ramdisk id -userData (-u) [String] User data -staticIpAddress (-s) [String] Static ip address -key (-h) [String] SSH key id -currentInstanceId (-c) [String] Current instance id -modify [flag] -instanceType (-t) [String] Instance type
In the simplest possible form a Virtual Machine needs a name and a corresponding Amazon Machine Image (AMI). You can use public or private AMIs. You will also probably want to specify a registered ssh key for the VM to use for authentication purposes and specify an instance type:
create-virtual-machine -n myVM -i ami-xxxxxx -key my-key-pair -t SMALL
If the virtual machine you want to create is already running you can associate it with an existing EC2 instance id using the -c flag. You can also optionally associate an elastic IP address and a security group with the Virtual Machine.
Starting a VM is as easy as:
start-virtual-machine -n <vm name>
This command will start the virtual machine as follows:
After the command completes successfuly the VM is ready for using. Since the tool prints the EC2 public dns name to stdout your shell scripts can capture this information in order to connect to the machine even if its not using an Elastic IP, for example:
set VM_ADDRES=`start-virtual-machine -n myVM`
The command describe-virtual-mahines can be used to display VM status information:
describe-virtual-machines
The describe-virtual-machines command can also be used with the -a flag , which will show detailed information about a single or all virtual machines:
Name Uptime DnsName InternalIpAddress InstanceId test none none none none website 205d22:20 ec2-174-129-201-163.compute-1.amazonaws.com 10.248.241.236 i-c4c026ac
Virtual Machine status can also be queried through the vm-get-status command. This command is intended to be used in shell scripts - it will exit with zero status if the virtual machine is running, and non-zero status if its not. In case the VM is running it will also write the public DNS name associated with the VM to the standard output.
Rain toolkit enables labeling an management of EC2 volumes. Volumes can be associated with Virtual Machines and can be attached and mounted automatically upon Virtual Machine startup.
To create a volume, use the create-volume command. Tt accepts the following arguments
-name (-n) [String] Volume name -size (-s) [Integer] Volume size in Gb -volume (-i) [String] Existing volume id -availabilityZone (-z) [String] Availability zone -snapshot [String] Snapshot id - populates the volume with the given snapshot data -newName [String] New volume name (modify only)
EBS volumes are most useful when they are attached to a Virtual Machine. Volumes can be associated ith Virtual Machines through the attach-volume command, which takes the arguments:
-volume (-v) [String] Volume name -virtualMachine (-n) [String] Virtual machine name -device (-d) [String] Attach device name -mountPoint (-m) [String] Mount point (if the volume should be automatically mounted) -mountDevice (-a) [String] Mount device name
Volumes associated with Virtual Machines can be attached and optionally mounted during the startup of the virtual machine. An attachment created with the -m (mount point) option will be automatically mounted, otherwise the volume will just be attahed to the Virtual Machine. This is useful if your instance startup scripts already take care of mounting volumes.
Volumes can be detached using the detach-volume command.
Both attach-command and detach-command commands do not modify the attachment status of running virtual machines, they only modify the metadata information used during VM startup.
Volumes can be described using the describe-volumes :
describe-volumes VolumeName VolumeId CreationTime Size Status AvailabilityZone AttachedSince AttachedTo AttachedDevice website-data vol-f63cd69f 2009-08-12T11:26:45.000Z 10 in-use us-east-1b 2009-08-17T16:34:11.000Z website /dev/sdh website-data-2010 vol-a376a5ca 2010-03-05T09:09:56.000Z 50 in-use us-east-1b 2010-03-05T09:10:19.000Z website /dev/sdi backup vol-549d793d 2008-12-11T23:05:24.000Z 20 available us-east-1a n/a n/a
Attached volumes are also shown by the describe-virtual-machine command when used with the -a argument:
describe-virtual-machines -n website -a websiteName Uptime DnsName InternalIpAddress InstanceId AvailabilityZone AMI KeyPair Kernel Ramdisk InstanceType: StaticIpAddress SecurityGroups UserData AutoRunCommand website 205d23:14 ec2-174-129-201-163.compute-1.amazonaws.com 10.248.241.236 i-c4c026ac us-east-1b ami-a18262c8 gsg-keypair default default SMALL 174.129.201.163 default none none Volumes Name VolumeId Device MountDevice MountPoint website-data-2010 vol-a376a5ca /dev/sdi /dev/sdi /data
The command create-snapshot can be used for creating a volume snapshot. describe-snapshot can then be used to describe the status of existing snapshots:
describe-snapshot SnapshotId Volume Status Progress StartTime snap-6619720f pair-data completed 100% 2009-12-22T09:45:48.000Z snap-c51a71ac website-data completed 100% 2009-12-22T09:44:36.000Z
The command backup-volume is a convenience command for making periodic backups of EBS volumes. It accepts the following arguments:
-id [String] Volume id -volume (-n) [String] Volume name -retentionPeriod (-r) [String] Maximum retention period. For instance: 1h (one hour), 2w (2 weeks), 3d (3 days)
The command works as follows: it immediately creates a snapshot of the specified volume and deletes all snapshots of the volume that are older than the specified retention period.
It is indented to be used in cron jobs. For instance, the command below, if run every day, will create a daily snapshot of the chosen volume and will keep the snapshots for 7 days:
backup-volume -n myVolume -r 7d
The Amazon EC2 security model includes an inbound firewall that can be used to limit access to running instances. This security model allows virtual machines to be managed securely over the Internet but if the managing end has a dynamic IP address then managing the access permissions can become painful.
To help manage this situation, RainToolkit allows the creation of named dynamic ip addresses. These permissions associated with these named addresses can then be updated with a single command.
To create a named dynamic ip address, use the create-dynamic-ip-address command as in the example below:
create-dynamic-ip-address -n myIpName -v wwww.xxxx.yyyy.zzzz
Existing dynamic addresses can be listed with the describe-dynamic-ip-addresses command.
Once a named ip address is created it can be updated with the update-dynamic-ip-address command. This command will take the new ip address provided (or detect the current IP address automatically using the dyndns.org checkip service), search the security rules in all groups for occurrences of the old value of this ip address and replace it with the new value.
Notice that this scheme will only work if there are security rules where the ip address value for this dynamic address appears as a single value, not as part of a network.