Ansible Plays for Typesafe ConductR

These plays and playbooks provision Typesafe ConductR cluster nodes in AWS EC2 using Ansible.

Use create-network-ec2.yml to setup a new VPC and create your cluster in the new VPC. You only need to provide your access keys and what region to execute in. The playbook outputs a vars file for use with the bbuild-training-cluster.yml.

The playbook bbuild-training-cluster.yml launches two instances across two availability zones. ConductR is installed on all instances and configured to form a cluster. The nodes are registered with a load balancer. This playbook can be used with new or existing VPCs.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following in order to use these playbooks.

• Access Key and Secret for an AWS Account with permissions to admin EC2.
• Ansible installed on a controller host. The faster the controller host's connection to the choosen EC2 region, the faster nodes will launch. Ssh access to a small to medium instance in the same AWS region as your cluster works well. See Ansible Setup below for further details.
• An AWS Key Pair (PEM file) downloaded to the Ansible controller host.
• A copy of the ConductR deb installation package on the Ansible controller host.
• A copy of this GitHub repo on the Ansible controller host.
• Ability to accept Oracle's Java License.

Setup

ConductR is not provided by this repository. Contact Typesafe to start your ConductR trial.

Copy the ConductR deb installation package into the conductr/files folder in your local copy of this repo. The installation package will be uploaded from this folder by the ConductR play to each of the EC2 instances for installation.

Log into the AWS Console and select or generate a key pair in the region you intend to use. You'll need both the path to a local copy of the PEM file and the key pair name use in console to record in our vars file.

Running the Plays

From an Ansible enabled shell, export your AWS Key and Secret for use by the plays.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='ABC123'
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='abc123'

Disable Ansible host key checking so that the play doesn't need you to accept the first connection to the nodes.

export ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING=False

Runing the create network play without any arguments defaults to executing in the EC2 region of us-east-1.

ansible-playbook create-ec2-training-network.yml

Optionally specify what EC2 region you want to execute in as EC2_REGION using a -e key value pair. For example to execute in eu-west-1:

ansible-playbook create-ec2-training-network.yml -e "EC2_REGION=eu-west-1"

The create network playbook produces a vars file in the vars folder named {{EC2_REGION}}_vars.yml where {{EC2_REGION}} is the region used. You must add the name of your key pair to {{EC2_REGION}}_vars.yml in order to use it with the build cluster script. Change the "Key Pair Name" of KEYPAIR: "Key Pair Name" to that of the key pair name, which may be different than the file name and generally does not end in the .pem file extension.

If you want to execute in a region other than us-east-1, you will also need to change the AMI value for IMAGE in your vars file to an Debian image in that region.

We pass both our vars file and EC2 PEM key to our playbook as command line arguments. The VARS_FILE template can be the one created from the create script. There is also a vars.yml template you can use instead. The private-key value must be the local path and filename of the keypair that has the key pair name KEYPAIR specified in the vars file. For example our key pair may be named ConductR_Key in AWS and reside locally as ~/secrets/ConductR.pem. In which case we would set KEYPAIR to ConductR_Key and pass ~/secrets/ConductR.pem as our private-key argument.

All the nodes will be assigned a public ip address so you can ssh into nodes using the specified PEM key with the user name from REMOTE_USER in vars/main.yml.

ansible-playbook build-training-cluster.yml -e "VARS_FILE=vars/{{EC2_REGION}}_vars.yml" --private-key /path/to/{{keypair}}

Accessing cluster applications

If all went well you now have a three node ConductR cluster. Any node in the cluster can serve any application deployed on the cluster. The ELB created by the create network playbook adds a listener on port 80 mapped to the Visualizer on port 9999. Start at least one instance of Visualizer in the cluster and access it using the ELB DNS Name in your browser!

Enabling SSL

Add a HTTPS listener to the load balancer in order to access the cluster securely. You will need to upload a X.509 certificate when creating an HTTPS listener if you haven't already.

Ansible Setup

These plays are being developed out of the current master branch of Ansible. They may or may not work with older packaged versions.

Setup Ansible from source using git and pip.

git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git --recursive
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools autoconf g++ python2.7-dev
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install paramiko PyYAML Jinja2 httplib2 boto

Create a hosts file for Ansible.

sudo mkdir /etc/ansible
echo -e "[local]\n127.0.0.1" | sudo tee -a /etc/ansible/hosts

Configure a shell to use Ansible from source

cd ansible
source ./hacking/env-setup -q