CloudStack Automation

CloudStack installation, setup, deployment and management can be primarily be performed via CloudMonkey, the official CLI and Ansible.

CloudMonkey

CloudMonkey is the official CLI for Apache CloudStack.

Install the old Python based CloudMonkey, follow this guide: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/CloudStack+cloudmonkey+CLI

Also, install and test the new Golang based CloudMonkey. Get the binary from: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-cloudmonkey/releases

Documentation for the modern CloudMonkey: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-cloudmonkey/wiki

API documentation: https://cloudstack.apache.org/api.html

Things to hack and learn:

Understand how to configure CloudMonkey
How to create and use CloudMonkey server profiles
How to make API requests in interpreter and command line modes
How to get API response outputs in various display format
How to use sed/awk and/or jq to process API response

Tools to use:

cloudmonkey (legacy)
cmk (modern)
bash and jq

Challenges:

Easy/Medium: Write a bash script to deploy few VMs using CloudMonkey and using jq capture and print list of running VMs. The bash script should take this number as a command line argument, for example to deploy 5 VMs:
```
bash deploy-script.sh 5
```
Hard: Write a bash script that can deploy an advanced CloudStack zone using CloudMonkey (hint: deploy a zone using the UI, before hitting the Launch zone button start tracing the API requests using Chrome/devtools)

Ansible and CloudStack

Ansible is a popular Python based configuration management tool. You can learn more about it here: https://www.ansible.com/resources/get-started

Recommended reading: http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/projects/archived-cloudstack-getting-started/en/latest/ansible.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.6/scenario_guides/guide_cloudstack.html

Example projects using Ansible for CloudStack automation:

Trillian, ACS environment automation: https://github.com/shapeblue/trillian
All in a box setup example: https://github.com/shapeblue/cloudstack-ansible
KVM automation example: https://github.com/rhtyd/peppercorn

Things to hack and learn:

How to use Ansible for any kind of automation
How to configure ansible and use the cloudstack ansible module

Tools to use:

ansible
bash

Challenges:

Deploy a VM in an isolated network or a VPC with two tiers

Terraform

https://github.com/apache/cloudstack-terraform-provider

CAPC

https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-cloudstack

https://cluster-api-cloudstack.sigs.k8s.io/

mbx

https://github.com/shapeblue/mbx