Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

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Sep
12
2020
VMs on KVM with Terraform
Posted by ebal at 19:26:56 in blog, planet_ellak, planet_Sysadmin, planet_fsfe

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.
    Tag: libvirt, kvm, cloud-init, terraform, ubuntu, qemu
Jun
10
2020
How to use cloud-init with Edis
Posted by ebal at 12:45:09 in blog, planet_ellak, planet_Sysadmin, planet_fsfe

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.

edis_auto_installer.png

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...

To see the entire article, click uppon article's title/link.
Thank you.
    Tag: edis, cloud-init
Mar
03
2019
Scaling automation with ansible-pull
Posted by ebal at 19:22:13 in blog, planet_ellak, planet_Sysadmin, planet_fsfe

Ansible is a wonderful software to automatically configure your systems. The default mode of using ansible is Push Model.

 

Ansible Push

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

To see the entire article, click uppon article's title/link.
Thank you.
    Tag: ansible, ansible-pull, gitlab, cloud-init
Jan
21
2019
Using Terraform and cloud-init on Hetzner
Posted by ebal at 20:09:06 in blog, planet_ellak, planet_Sysadmin, planet_fsfe

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.

hetzner_token.png

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<...

To see the entire article, click uppon article's title/link.
Thank you.
    Tag: terraform, cloud-init, hetzner
Nov
18
2018
Cloud-init with CentOS 7
Posted by ebal at 14:04:17 in blog, planet_ellak, planet_Sysadmin, planet_fsfe

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

cloud-init.png

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.
    Tag: cloud-init, libvirt, qemu, kvm, centos7
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