How to easily automate provisioning to any cloud using Vagrant and Abiquo

For those of you who don’t know about Vagrant, it is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments and, so, helping you to move forward in adopting a devops culture, making possible for a developer to bring up more similar environments to those deployed in production.Out of the box, Vagrant supports some providers like Virtualbox, VMware (Fusion or Workstation) or Hyper-V. This means that Vagrant can automatically create the VMs your environment needs in these providers, then apply the configuration needed for your application to run. Well, as of now, you can add Abiquo as a provider for Vagrant, making it capable of deploying new VMs in Abiquo and applying the configuration over those VMs.

In order to work with Vagrant, you need a Vagrantfile where you define all the VMs your environment needs, and for every VM, the provisioning steps needed (configuration). Let’s take a look at a very basic Vagrantfile.

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync"
  config.vm.define "test" do |test|
    test.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo Hello, World"
  end
end

If you just run vagrant up with this Vagrantfile, a VM will be created in VirtualBox (the default provider unless otherwise specified), and a single configuration step will be run, a simple Hello, World message will be displayed.

Now, getting the Abiquo plugin for Vagrant is quite straightforward. Of course you need Vagrant installed, then launch a terminal and type:

vagrant plugin install abiquo_vagrant

This will download and install the necessary files so Vagrant can deploy VMs in Abiquo. Now we can modify a bit our Vagrantfile. Let’s make it look like:

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync"
  config.vm.define "test" do |test|
    test.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo Hello, World"
  end
  config.vm.provider :abiquo do |provider, override|
    override.vm.box = 'abiquo'
    override.vm.box_url = "https://github.com/abiquo/vagrant_abiquo/raw/master/box/abiquo.box"
    override.vm.hostname = 'abiquo-test'
    provider.abiquo_connection_data = {
      abiquo_api_url: 'https://my.abiquo.cloud/api',
      abiquo_username: 'myself',
      abiquo_password: 'mypass'
    }
    provider.virtualdatacenter = 'Barcelona'
    provider.virtualappliance = 'Vagrant Tests'
    provider.template = 'Centos 7 x86_64'
    override.ssh.private_key_path = '~/.ssh/id_rsa'
  end
end

Now, we added a new block, describing the configuration of the Abiquo provider in this environment. As you can see, we have to provide a fake box as we will be deploying one of the templates available in Abiquo instead of the regular boxes used in VirtualBox. Then we provide the connection info for the Abiquo API, providing its endpoint and credentials, and finally, the VirtualDatacenter and VirtualAppliance where we want to deploy the VM and which template shall it use.
Great! Now it’s as simple as running:

vagrant up --provider=abiquo

You will see Vagrant connects and checks for the availability of the template, VirtualDatacenter, etc. Then creates and deploys the VM, and finally will connect to it and run the provisioning step defined for the VM. Easy!

Now, this is a very basic example on how to get Vagrant to work with Abiquo, but there are a lot of examples on different application environments that can be deployed with Vagrant, which you can now modify so the application they describe runs in your Abiquo based cloud instead of your development workstation.

For example, the guys from CoreOS have a Vagrantfile to deploy Kubernetes on top of CoreOS, which you can modify to launch the Kubernetes cluster over your Abiquo based cloud.