Preface

This document describes the functionality provided by the EC2 plugin.

See the XL Deploy Reference Manual for background information on XL Deploy and deployment concepts.

Overview

The EC2 plugin is a XL Deploy plugin that supports launching, provisioning and terminating hosts and environments on Amazon EC2 platform.

The EC2 plugin is part of XL Scale. For more information about XL Scale, see the XL Scale Manual.

Features

• Launching and terminating EC2 instances from XL Deploy;
• Optional launching within Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud);
• Combining EC2 instances into environments which can be used for application deployment;
• Registering middleware on EC2 instances as part of a created environment.

Requirements

• XL Deploy requirements

  • XL Deploy: version 4.0+
  • Other XL Deploy Plugins: XL Scale

• Infrastructural requirements

  • EC2 credentials: AWS key and secret for accessing the Amazon EC2 platform via its API.

Usage scenarios

This section describes the most common usage scenarios, further sections contain more detailed configuration instructions.

Creating a single host

In its simplest form, the EC2 plugin can launch a single instance on EC2 and register it in XL Deploy as a CI of type cloud.SshHost (when connecting to the host using SSH) or cloud.CifsHost (when connecting using CIFS). The resulting host CI can contain middleware CIs that are present on the host and can be used as normal containers for deployment. The host can also be destroyed, which causes XL Deploy to terminate the EC2 instance and remove the host CI and its children from the repository.

There is a special CI type ec2.HostTemplate which is used as a template to define all information about the future host.

Creating an environment

For more information about combining cloud hosts into environments, see the XL Scale Manual.

Provisioning instantiated hosts

When launching an instance on EC2, the AMI it is based on may already have the desired middleware installed. If this is the case, a launched host will be ready for use as soon as it has finished booting. It is also possible to provision a host using Puppet, Chef or a shell command after launching it. This is supported via the the notion of marker file. If the host template specifies a marker file, XL Deploy will poll the launched instance for its presence. When the file is found on the instance filesystem, XL Deploy will conclude the host is up and ready for deployment. The location of the marker file can be configured in the ec2.HostTemplate.

See the section on the marker file in the XL Scale Manual for additional details on the polling process.

Note:

• it is the responsibility of the AMI to invoke the provisioning process and to create the marker file when provisioning is completed, signaling that the host and middleware is ready for deployment.
• marker files are only supported on Unix-based AMIs.

Configuration instructions

EC2 credentials

The EC2 plugin requires access to the AWS key and secret to access the EC2 API. These credentials are specified under the Configuration root node in the repository using a ec2.Credentials CI. The CI has a control task validateCredentials that can test that the credentials can be used to communicate with EC2.

Host template

The next step is to define host template CIs (ec2.HostTemplate). A host template describes a single host that can be launched on EC2. In addition to the generic host template properties, it allows some EC2-specific properties.

See CI reference for list of ec2.HostTemplate properties and their meaning.

See the XL Scale Manual for the generic properties.

Here is an example of an EC2 host descriptor:

<#escape x as x?xml>
  <list>
    <cloud.SshHost id="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}">
      <template ref="${hostTemplate.id}"/>
      <cloudId>${cloudId}</cloudId>
      <address>${hostAddress}</address>
      <#if hostTemplate.privateKeyFile??><privateKeyFile>${hostTemplate.privateKeyFile}</privateKeyFile></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.username??><username>${hostTemplate.username}</username></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.password??><password>${hostTemplate.password}</password></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.os??><os>${hostTemplate.os}</os></#if>
      <#if hostTemplate.connectionType??><connectionType>${hostTemplate.connectionType}</connectionType></#if>
    </cloud.SshHost>
    <www.ApacheHttpdServer id="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}/httpd">
      <host ref="${hostsPath}/${hostTemplate.name}_${hostAddress}"/>
      <startCommand>sudo apachectl stop</startCommand>
      <startWaitTime>3</startWaitTime>
      <stopCommand>sudo apachectl stop</stopCommand>
      <stopWaitTime>3</stopWaitTime>
      <restartCommand>sudo apachectl restart</restartCommand>
      <restartWaitTime>10</restartWaitTime>
      <defaultDocumentRoot>/var/www</defaultDocumentRoot>
      <configurationFragmentDirectory>/etc/apache2/conf.d</configurationFragmentDirectory>
    </www.ApacheHttpdServer>
  </list>
</#escape>

Every ec2.HostTemplate CI provides a validateDescriptor control task which processes the Freemarker template, parses the resulting XML and reports errors if something is wrong. No actual changes are made to the repository during execution of this control task.

Please note that:

• EC2 hosts which you define here should be either cloud.SshHost or cloud.CifsHost.
• The cloud.SshHost or cloud.CifsHost in the template must contain the XML fragments for address, cloudId and template. These are needed for the proper functioning of the plugin.
• You should always use <list> as a parent XML element, even if you define only one CI.
• When you use references to ${hostTemplate.*} properties, make sure they are defined on host template when required by the appropriate CI types. E.g. cloud.SshHost requires connectionType, when ec2.HostTemplate does not.
• Since XML is being generated you have to make sure that values are properly encoded. You can achieve this by enclosing the template in <#escape x as x?xml>...</#escape>, or alternatively use ${exampleKey?xml}. See the Freemarker documentation for details.

Environment template

For more information about defining environment templates, see the XL Scale Manual.

Using the EC2 plugin

Please see the XL Scale manual for instructions on how to use the environment and host templates provided in the EC2 plugin.

Upgrade notes

Upgrading from version 3.9.4 or below

• Follow steps required for version 3.9.3 or below if applicable.
• Before installing the distribution please make sure that following libraries are not present in plugins folder. Remove them if they are.
  • aopalliance-*.jar
  • asm-*.jar
  • aws-common-*.jar
  • aws-ec2-*.jar
  • cglib-*.jar
  • cloud-plugin-*.jar
  • ec2-*.jar
  • ec2-plugin-*.jar
  • gson-*.jar
  • guava-*.jar
  • guice-*.jar
  • guice-assistedinject-*.jar
  • javax.inject-*.jar
  • jclouds-compute-*.jar
  • jclouds-core-*.jar
  • jclouds-scriptbuilder-*.jar
  • jsr250-api-*.jar
  • jsr311-api-*.jar
  • rocoto-*.jar

Upgrading from version 3.9.3 or below

• Beginning from version 3.9.4, field groups of ec2.HostTemplate CI type has to contain IDs of EC2 security groups. If you already have templates, that contain group names, please replace those values with IDs according to the information in EC2 console.

Release notes

XL Scale plugin version 4.0.0

As a major change, Cloud plugin has been rebranded to XL Scale.

Improvements:

• [DEPL-5489] - How to update in case of connections of type WINRM, WINRM_HTTP, WINRM_HTTPS have been used.

Fixed Bugs:

• [DEPL-4909] - Cloud instances from the same template get the same instance ID

EC2 plugin version 4.0.0

Improvements:

• [DEPL-5089] - Add ability to VPC subnet of an EC2 instance

Fixed Bugs:

• [DEPL-5620] - XL Scale EC2 plugin does not work with JDK 7.51 and higher.

Cloud plugin version 3.9.4

Improvements:

• [DEPLOYITPB-4995] - Add ability to set tags on EC2 instance
• [DEPL-5089] - Add ability to VPC subnet of an EC2 instance

Fixed bugs:

• [DEPLOYITPB-5081] - environmentTemplate is not exposed in the template
• [DEPLOYITPB-4864] - Host template validation exposes password (improvement of the fix made in 3.9.3)

EC2 plugin version 3.9.3

Improvements:

• [DEPLOYITPB-4864] - Host template validation exposes password