jclouds ProfitBricks

Terms

Like any cloud provider, ProfitBricks has its own set of terms in cloud computing. To abstract this into jclouds' Compute interface, these terms were associated:

• Node - composite instance of Server and Storage
• Image - both user-uploaded and provided Images; and Snapshots
• Location - DataCenters and Region (Las Vegas, Frankfurt, etc.)
• Hardware - number of cores, RAM size and storage size

Getting Started

Assuming that there's atleast one datacenter existing in your account, the provider needs only an identity (your ProfitBricks email), and credentials (password) to provision a Node, by using a ProfitBricks-provided ubuntu-12.04 image as a template.

ComputeService compute = ContextBuilder.newBuilder( "profitbricks" )
					.credentials( "profitbricks email", "password" )
					.buildView( ComputeServiceContext.class )
					.getComputeService();

This works well; however, we won‘t be able to use jclouds’ ability to execute scripts on a remote node. This is because, ProfitBricks' default images require users to change passwords upon first log in.

To enable jclouds to execute script, we need to use a custom image. The easiest way to do this is via ProfitBricks snapshot:

• Go to your DCD.
• Provision a server + storage, and connect it to the internet. Upon success, you will receive an email containing the credentials needed to login to your server.
• Login to your server, and change the password, as requested.

~ ssh root@<remote-ip>
...
Changing password for root.
(current) UNIX password: 
Enter new UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password: 
~ root@ubuntu:~# exit

• Go back to the DCD, and make a snapshot of the storage. Put a descriptive name.
• Configure jclouds to use this snapshot.

Template template = compute.templateBuilder()
	.imageNameMatches( "<ideally-unique-snapshot-name>" )
	.options( compute.templateOptions()
				.overrideLoginUser( "root" ) // unless you changed the user
				.overrideLoginPassword( "<changed-password>" ))
	// more options, as you need
	.build();
	
compute.createNodesInGroup( "cluster1", 1, template );

If no locationId is specified in the template, jclouds will look for a DataCenter that is of same scope as the Image.

Limitations

• There's no direct way of specifying arbitrary number of cores, RAM size, and storage size via the compute interface, at least until after JCLOUDS-482 is resolved. The adapter uses a predefined list hardware profiles instead.

Take note that these features are still accessible by unwraping the ProfitBricks API, but this'll reduce portability of your code. See Concepts.