many thanks to erethon for his help & support on this article.
Working on your home lab, it is quiet often that you need to spawn containers or virtual machines to test or develop something. I was doing this kind of testing with public cloud providers with minimal VMs and for short time of periods to reduce any costs. In this article I will try to explain how to use libvirt -that means kvm- with terraform and provide a simple way to run this on your linux machine.
Be aware this will be a (long) technical article and some experience is needed with kvm/libvirt & terraform but I will try to keep it simple so you can follow the instructions.
Terraform
Install Terraform v0.13 either from your distro or directly from hashicopr’s site.
To see the entire article, click uppon article's title/link.
Thank you.It is a known fact, that my favorite hosting provider is edis. I’ve seen them improving their services all these years, without forgeting their customers. Their support is great and I am really happy working with them.
That said, they dont offer (yet) a public infrastructre API like hetzner, linode or digitalocean but they offer an Auto Installer option to configure your VPS via a post-install shell script, put your ssh key and select your basic OS image.
I am experimenting with this option the last few weeks, but I wanted to use my currect cloud-init configuration file without making many changes. The goal is to produce a VPS image that when finished will be ready to accept my ansible roles without making any addition change or even login to this VPS.
So...
Thank you.
Ansible is a wonderful software to automatically configure your systems. The default mode of using ansible is Push Model.
That means from your box, and only using ssh + python, you can configure your flee of machines.
Ansible is imperative. You define tasks in your playbooks, roles and they will run in a serial manner on the remote machines. The task will first check if needs to run and otherwise it will skip the action. And although we can use conditional to skip actions, tasks will perform all checks. For that reason ansible seems slow instead of other configuration tools. Ansible runs in serial mode the tasks but in psedo-parallel mode against the remote servers, to increase the speed. But sometimes you need to gather_facts
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Using Terraform by HashiCorp and cloud-init on Hetzner cloud provider.
Nowadays with the help of modern tools, we use our infrastructure as code. This approach is very useful because we can have Immutable design with our infra by declaring the state would like our infra to be. This also provide us with flexibility and a more generic way on how to handle our infra as lego bricks, especially on scaling.
UPDATE: 2019.01.22
Hetzner
We need to create an Access API Token within a new project under the console of hetzner cloud.
Copy this token and with that in place we can continue with terraform.
For the purposes of this article, I am going to use as the API token: 01234567890<...
Thank you.
Cloud-init is the defacto multi-distribution package that handles early initialization of a cloud instance
This article is a mini-HowTo use cloud-init with centos7 in your own libvirt qemu/kvm lab, instead of using a public cloud provider.
How Cloud-init works
Josh Powers @ DebConf17
How really works?
Cloud-init has Boot Stages
- Generator
- Local
- Network
- Config
- Final
and supports modules to extend configuration and support.
Here is a brief list of modules (sorted by name):
- bootc...To see the entire article, click uppon article's title/link.
Thank you.