At Voxel, we’re big believers in automating infrastructure, and one of the tools we’re most excited about right now is Opscode’s Chef. Chef provides us with Knife, a convenient tool that allows you to easily manage one or more Chef instances.
So, historically, you would use Voxel’s API to provision a VoxCLOUD or VoxSERVER device, then use Knife to bootstrap and spin that provisioned node up as a Chef client. Today we would like to announce that a Voxel specific Knife plugin has been made available via RubyGems/GitHub: ‘knife-voxel’.
Currently on version 0.0.7, the Voxel/Chef plugin allows you to provision (and bootstrap) Voxel’s virtual and dedicated instances (known as VoxCLOUD servers and VoxSERVERS in marketing-speak) as well as list and delete previously provisioned instances.
But there will be a lot more functionality to look forward to in the coming weeks, functionality that will continue to enhance the Voxel/Chef experience.
At this time, the knife-voxel plugin has the following commands:
- knife voxel voxcloud delete DEVICE_ID (options) - knife voxel voxservers inventory list (options) - knife voxel images list (options) - knife voxel voxcloud create (options) - knife voxel devices list (options) - knife voxel voxservers delete DEVICE_ID (options) - knife voxel voxservers create (options) - knife voxel voxservers reimage DEVICE_ID (options)
These commands mirror Voxel’s hAPI methods as defined @ https://api.voxel.net/docs/.
Authentication can be handled in a few different ways. For each command you can pass –voxel-api-key and –voxel-api-secret with your corresponding hAPI key/secret pair. Or if you prefer, you can utilize your username and password via the –voxel-api-username and –voxel-api-password parameters. Both of these parameter sets can be specified in a knife.rb file, saving you the trouble of entering them each time at the command line. We suggest using a stored authkey/secret pair rather than a username and password when placing these options in knife.rb. The syntax is:
knife[:voxel_api_key] = '01234567890' knife[:voxel_api_secret] = '09876543210'
To list all available images, and their corresponding IDs:
> knife voxel images list
To list the available dedicated VoxSERVER inventory, by facility, run the command:
> knife voxel voxservers inventory list
To provision a 4 core VoxCLOUD instances with 50GB of disk and Ubuntu10.04 LTS at our LGA8 facility you would run the following:
> knife voxel voxcloud create --facility LGA8 --hostname my.new.chef.instance --processing-cores 4 --disk-size 50 --image-id 55
To provision an available VoxSERVER configuration from inventory with our managed CentOS variant, VSE:
> knife voxel voxservers create --facility LGA8 --configuration-id 2 > --hostname my.physical.chef.instance --image-id 16
And if you’re looking for further information for each command issue:
--help
We’re really excited to be able to offer these infrastructure automation tools to our clients – look for more to come!
