So, I am pretty interested in cloud computing of late and thought I would give swift from openstack a shot. After going through the several steps described here, I decided to try and script the process. Here are the (hopefully) much simpler steps.
- Create an instance at Amazon using ami-bd37ded4 which is Ubuntu 10.4.
- Shell to your instance as the ubuntu user.
- wget http://blog.spack.net/saio.sh
- sudo bash saio.sh
Once the script finishes if you source your /etc/profile (. /etc/profile) to pick up a couple environment variables you should be able to see something by running
$ st stat
st is a command line tool for interacting with swift. Type st<ENTER> to see some options.
A few notes. The saio.sh script needs to be run as root and it will grab a couple more scripts (saio-guest-1.sh and saio-guest-2.sh) that get run as the user you create. You can set a few environment variables before running the scripts if you like, but the defaults will likely work just fine for you.
DISK_SIZE – size in bytes for how big of a drive to make, defaults to 10240. The scripts just create a loop back device
MY_USER – user to run swift as, defaults to swift
MY_GROUP – group to run swift as, defaults to $MY_USER
MY_SHELL – shell for $MY_USER, defaults to /bin/bash
We now can poke around a bit using st. Let’s make some dummy content
$ mkdir my_cool_directory
$ for i in {1..5};do echo “howdy file $i on `date`” >> my_cool_directory/$i; done
$ st upload my_cool_container my_cool_directory
Then you can try a couple things like
$ st stat
Account: aea05981-0136-4024-a2b1-d015df8e0c96
Containers: 1
Objects: 0
Bytes: 0
$ st list
my_cool_container
$ st list my_cool_container
my_cool_directory/1
my_cool_directory/2
my_cool_directory/3
my_cool_directory/4
my_cool_directory/5
I think the beauty of cloud computing is that for 8.5 cents (an hour) you can test out a likely pretty cool new offering. Eventually, I would like to provide a lasic script that might be a touch cleaner, but I think this rather clean 🙂
Enjoy!
Earl