Everything Under Control

Opening a Connection to the Amazon Public Cloud

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) consist of services, for example, virtual servers (EC2), storage (S3), and networking (CloudFront, VPC), which are managed in a web interface and billed on the basis of usage per hour or per resource. In addition to the AWS web front end, a programming interface lets administrators manage the AWS services at the command line.

The openQRM Hybrid Cloud plugin can integrate and manage an existing AWS account via this interface. The openQRM website [7] again offers an exhaustive how-to for this scenario; I will thus give a brief overview of the basic, required steps.

After installing the Hybrid Cloud plugin, you first need to install the current API and AMI tools on the openQRM server. To do so, log in to the openQRM server as root and run the commands shown in Listing 2.

wget s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zipwget s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip
unzip ec2-api-tools.zip
unzip ec2-ami-tools.zip
mkdir /usr/local/ec2
cp -r ec2-ami-tools-1.5.7/* /usr/local/ec2/
cp -r ec2-api-tools-1.7.3.2/* /usr/local/ec2/
apt-get update && apt-get install default-jdk

You might have different version numbers, but the numbers shown in the listing were up to date when this issue went to press. Incidentally, you will find a link to the download of the AMI/API tools in the Plugins section Cloud | Hybrid-Cloud | About | Plugin Type . The link specified there also takes you to comprehensive documentation for the tools. Add both of these programs to your system path by adding the following environmental variable to your /etc/profile:

export EC2_HOME=/usr/local/ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr

To enable the environmental variables, log off and back on. Then, type

service openqrm restart

to restart the openQRM services.

It is a good idea to create a separate user account for openQRM in the IAM section of your AWS account. Then, run the following at the command line to test whether the connection to AWS is working:

ec2-describe-regions -O AWS-Access-Key -W AWS-Secret-Key

Instead of the placeholders, enter your AWS access key and secret key. The results should look something like this:

REGION eu-central-1 ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com
REGION sa-east-1 ec2.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com
REGION ap-northeast-1 ec2.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com
...

You are now ready to start creating and managing instances in the Amazon Cloud.

Conclusions

To get an openQRM project up and running within a reasonable period of time, administrators either need to have a solid background in system architecture and open source tools or contact the manufacturer for professional support in their planning, installation, and configuration steps. The control logic behind openQRM is not entirely intuitive (as is the case with most cloud management systems). Missing or obsolete documentation adds obstacles to the learning process.

Administrators with experience in open source and Linux will enjoy openQRM, however. Thanks to the open, plugin-based system architecture, openQRM provides many well-known and popular system tools from the Linux world without requiring any major configuration overhead. Additionally, the manufacturer offers a reasonably priced licensing model, backed up by competent support.