Creating an EC2 Provisioning Module for VCL

Cameron Mann & Everett Toews

Virtual Computing Lab (VCL)

• Apache Incubator project

• Dynamically provision physical and virtual machines

for end-users

* Image from http://cwiki.apache.org/VCL

Motivation

• Cloud computing is growing quickly

• AWS, OpenStack, Eucalyptus

• Opportunity to easily add significant compute

resources to VCL

• Makes it easier to pilot or scale VCL

• What if all you had to do to setup a VCL system was

supply the management node?

Objectives

• End users should never have to know they’re using

the EC2 provisioning module

• Avoid changes to existing code

• Maintain VCL’s flexibility as much as possible

VCL Terminology

• Computer

– Can refer to physical or virtual machine

– Each virtual machine is associated with a VM host

– Describes available hardware

• VM Host

– Computer that hosts virtual machines

• Image

– Disk image used to launch virtual machines

– Minimum hardware requirements

EC2 Terminology

• Endpoint

– Exposes the EC2 API to users

• Instance

– Equivalent to a virtual machine

• Image

– Disk image used to launch instances

– Also kernel and ramdisk images

• Machine Type

– Describes the hardware an instance will be launched with

VCL + EC2

• Image

– VCL image => EC2 image

– Minimum hardware => machine type

• Computer

– VM host => endpoint

– Virtual machine => instance

– Available hardware => largest machine type

Provisioning

Provisioning Cont.

1. User selects image and time

2. VCL finds a computer that the user has permission

to use, meets the hardware requirements of the

image and is available at the specified time

3. Provisioning module generates run instances

request and sends to EC2 API endpoint

4. Wait for instance to launch and run OS post load

tasks

Image Capture

• Use the cloud’s existing image management, don’t

try to replace it

• Images are cloud-dependent

• EC2 utilities available to bundle/upload/register

• Works well for Linux, Windows is more complicated

What’s Left?

• Networking

– VCL assumes two interfaces: one private, one public

– Instances have one private interface

– Public IP addresses assigned through NAT

• Expectation conflicts with reality

• Open source under Apache License

Questions?