Description

This cookbook provides libraries, resources and providers to configure and manage Amazon Web Services components and offerings with the EC2 API. Currently supported resources:

• EBS Volumes (ebs_volume)
• Elastic IPs (elastic_ip)

Requirements

Requires Chef 0.7.10 or higher for Lightweight Resource and Provider support. Chef 0.8+ is recommended. While this cookbook can be used in chef-solo mode, to gain the most flexibility, we recommend using chef-client with a Chef Server.

An Amazon Web Services account is required. The Access Key and Secret Access Key are used to authenticate with EC2.

AWS Credentials

In order to manage AWS components, authentication credentials need to be available to the node. There are a number of ways to handle this, such as node attributes or roles. We recommend storing these in a databag (Chef 0.8+), and loading them in the recipe where the resources are needed.

DataBag recommendation:

% knife data bag show aws main
{
  "id": "main",
  "aws_access_key_id": "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
  "aws_secret_access_key": "YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"
}

This can be loaded in a recipe with:

aws = data_bag_item("aws", "main")

And to access the values:

aws['aws_access_key_id']
aws['aws_secret_access_key']

We'll look at specific usage below.

Recipes

default.rb

The default recipe installs the right_aws RubyGem, which this cookbook requires in order to work with the EC2 API. Make sure that the aws recipe is in the node or role run_list before any resources from this cookbook are used.

"run_list": [
  "recipe[aws]"
]

The gem_package is created as a Ruby Object and thus installed during the Compile Phase of the Chef run.

Libraries

The cookbook has a library module, Opscode::AWS::Ec2, which can be included where necessary:

include Opscode::Aws::Ec2

This is needed in any providers in the cookbook. Along with some helper methods used in the providers, it sets up a class variable, ec2 that is used along with the access and secret access keys

Resources and Providers

This cookbook provides two resources and corresponding providers.

ebs_volume.rb

Manage Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes with this resource.

Actions:

• create - create a new volume.
• attach - attach the specified volume.
• detach - detach the specified volume.
• snapshot - create a snapshot of the volume.
• prune - prune snapshots.

Attribute Parameters:

• aws_secret_access_key, aws_access_key - passed to Opscode::AWS:Ec2 to authenticate, required.
• size - size of the volume in gigabytes.
• snapshot_id - snapshot to build EBS volume from.
• availability_zone - EC2 region, and is normally automatically detected.
• device - local block device to attach the volume to, e.g. /dev/sdi but no default value, required.
• volume_id - specify an ID to attach, cannot be used with action :create because AWS assigns new volume IDs
• timeout - connection timeout for EC2 API.
• snapshots_to_keep - used with action :prune for number of snapshots to maintain.
• description - used to set the description of an EBS snapshot

elastic_ip.rb

Actions:

• associate - associate the IP.
• disassociate - disassociate the IP.

Attribute Parameters:

• aws_secret_access_key, aws_access_key - passed to Opscode::AWS:Ec2 to authenticate, required.
• ip - the IP address.
• timeout - connection timeout for EC2 API.

Usage

For both the ebs_volume and elastic_ip resources, put the following at the top of the recipe where they are used.

include_recipe "aws"
aws = data_bag_item("aws", "main")

aws_ebs_volume

The resource only handles manipulating the EBS volume, additional resources need to be created in the recipe to manage the attached volume as a filesystem or logical volume.

aws_ebs_volume "db_ebs_volume" do
  aws_access_key aws['aws_access_key_id']
  aws_secret_access_key aws['aws_secret_access_key']
  size 50
  device "/dev/sdi"
  action [ :create, :attach ]
end

This will create a 50G volume, attach it to the instance as /dev/sdi.

aws_ebs_volume "db_ebs_volume_from_snapshot" do
  aws_access_key aws['aws_access_key_id']
  aws_secret_access_key aws['aws_secret_access_key']
  size 50
  device "/dev/sdi"
  snapshot_id "snap-ABCDEFGH"
  action [ :create, :attach ]
end

This will create a new 50G volume from the snapshot ID provided and attach it as /dev/sdi.

aws_elastic_ip

The elastic_ip resource provider does not support allocating new IPs. This must be done before running a recipe that uses the resource. After allocating a new Elastic IP, we recommend storing it in a databag and loading the item in the recipe.

Databag structure:

% knife data bag show aws eip_load_balancer_production
{
  "id": "eip_load_balancer_production",
  "public_ip": "YOUR_ALLOCATED_IP"
}

Then to set up the Elastic IP on a system:

ip_info = data_bag_item("aws", "eip_load_balancer_production")

aws_elastic_ip "eip_load_balancer_production" do
  aws_access_key aws['aws_access_key_id']
  aws_secret_access_key aws['aws_secret_access_key']
  ip ip_info['public_ip']
  action :associate
end

This will use the loaded aws and ip_info databags to pass the required values into the resource to configure. Note that when associating an Elastic IP to an instance, connectivity to the instance will be lost because the public IP address is changed. You will need to reconnect to the instance with the new IP.

You can also store this in a role as an attribute or assign to the node directly, if preferred.

License and Author

Author:: Chris Walters (cw@opscode.com)
Author:: AJ Christensen (aj@opscode.com)

Copyright 2009-2010, Opscode, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Changes

v0.99.1

• [COOK-530] - aws cookbook doesn't save attributes with chef 0.10.RC.0
• [COOK-600] - In AWS Cookbook specifying just the device doesn't work
• [COOK-601] - in aws cookbook :prune action keeps 1 less snapshot than snapshots_to_keep
• [COOK-610] - Create Snapshot action in aws cookbook should allow description attribute
• [COOK-819] - fix documentation bug in aws readme
• [COOK-829] - AWS cookbook does not work with most recent right_aws gem but no version is locked in the recipe