presentations/2021-03-01-recycledcloud-intro/slides.md

title	author	institute	date	license
Recycled Cloud Technical Intro	Timothée Floure	e-Durable SA	2021-03-01	CC BY-SA

It works! (TM)

\begin{center} We even have a website! \href{https://recycled.cloud/}{https://recycled.cloud/} \end{center}

High-Level Overview

• 3 locations - Yes, it's overkill.

• LNTH and LSNE are production capable.

• LNTH has power and network redundancy.

• Networking + Distributed Storage + QEMU/KVM VMs.

• Humans: 1-1.5 Summer, 0.5 Autumn, 0.25 January, 1.25 these days.

Public-ish services

• Web hosting: Static + Wordpress - unmanaged.
• Storage / backups - unmanaged.
• KVM Virtual Machine Hosting - unmanaged.

e-Durable is our biggest client by far.

• No management interface or billing pipeline so far.
  • Billing is hard. We'll leverage Odoo.

A bit of History

\begin{center} \includegraphics{ungleich-logo-black.png} \end{center}

• I arrived from ungleich.
• The 3 locations were already in the pipe.
• OpenStack (and JuJu + MAAS).
• Had to drop everything and start from scratch.
• Only low-end hardware around.

System Administration 101

• Setting something up is easy, keeping it running is not.
• Complexity is your worst enemy.

Technial Stack - General guidelines

• KISS: Keep things as simple as possible.
• Alpine Linux and Debian GNU/Linux.
• Document things in the Wiki (wiki.recycled.cloud).
• Use configuration management (cdist).
• Obviously FOSS-only... non-free software is a PITA!

Technical Stack - Networking

• We are registered at RIPE: AS208948, x1 IPv4 /22, x1 IPv6 /29.
• External BGP peering in every location, OSPF internally.
• Two edge routers per location, for redundancy.
• IPv6-first - IPv4 is LEGACY (and painful)!

Technical Stack - Core Infrastructure

\begin{center} \includegraphics{location.png} \end{center}

Technical Stack - Services

• Services usually run in their own VM.
• Central user directory with OpenLDAP.
• Monitoring is provided by Prometheus + Grafana.
• Backups with Borg.
• ...

Tooling

• There was no tooling at e-Durable, so we made our own.
• Software Forge: code.recycled.cloud
• Documentation: wiki.recycled.cloud
• Mailing Lists: lists.recycled.cloud
• File Sharing: files.recycled.cloud
• Chat: chat.recycled.cloud

Buffer slide

That's all for the big lines! Let's do some hands-on exercises now.

• Allocating & accessing a new VM.
• Using the Software Forge.
• Configure said VM with cdist.

Allocating a new VM

\begin{center} \includegraphics[width=5cm]{one-logo.png} \end{center}

• Web interface at one.$LOCATION.recycled.cloud, LDAP account.
• VMs are defined by templates.
• We build our own images - see the RecycledCloud/images repository
• Allocating a new VM is easy: demo.

Using the Software Forge

\begin{center} \includegraphics[width=10cm]{gitea-logo.png} \end{center}

• Our VCS is git.
• Everything regarding the RC lives in version control.
• If you don't use version control, you're likely doing it wrong.
• code.recycled.cloud provides remote git repositories and simple issue tracking.
• Joachim makes lovely git introductions.

CDIST

\begin{center} \includegraphics[width=5cm]{cdist-logo.jpeg} \end{center}

• Configuration management tool (similar to Ansible, Puppet, Chef, ...).
• KISS. Do one thing, and do it right.
• Originally written by ungleichfolk, much larger community now.
• Shellscript.

CDIST 101

• Manifests
• Types
• Explorers

e-Durable CDIST workflow

• dot-cdist.
• cdist-workdir meta repository and third-party sources.
• RecycledCloud and e-Durable each have their own repositories.
• Shellcheck (it's convenient to have it built-in in your editor...).

References

• Recycled Cloud account management: meta.recycled.cloud
• Recycled Cloud Software Forge: code.recycled.cloud
• Recycled Cloud Wiki: wiki.recycled.cloud
• CDIST Manual: cdi.st
• OpenNebula Web UI: one.{lnth,lsne}.ch.recycled.cloud