Infrastructure as a service cloud development

There are two very useful Firefox plug-ins for working with the SmartCloud Enterprise REST APIs.  Actually, these are useful for working with any REST API's.  They are:

 I will discuss the User Agent Switcher in this blog entry.  This plug-in allows you to change the value for the User Agent HTTP header. It can only be used for GET requests.  The plug-in can be installed directly from the Tools | Add-ons menu in Firefox.  The project web site is at http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/.  After installing the plug-in and restarting Firefox, enter a new user agent profile.  Do this by bringing up the Edit User Agents dialog by selecting the Tools | Default user Agent | Edit User Agents menu.  This is shown below.

 

 

 Click the New button and enter values for the fields.  Importantly, set the value for User Agent to something that does not contain 'Mozilla' or 'IE'.  Browsers are disallowed from invoking the REST APIs with the default User Agent header.  This dialog is shown below.

 

 

 Click OK for both dialogs saving the profile with a name, say 'cloudapi'.  Now that you have added the user agent profile select it by clicking on the Tools | Default User Agent | cloudapi.  Now you are ready to invoke the REST API.  Paste the URL below into your browser's address bar or click on it:

 

 

This will fetch the list of virtual machine instances you own.  You will be prompted for your user id and password.  Then the instances will be displayed in the browser in XML format.  Another useful one URL is

 

https://www-147.ibm.com/computecloud/enterprise/api/rest/20100331/offerings/vlan

Which lists the VLANs assigned to your organization at each data center.

 

The full set of URLs for the REST API is listed in the SCE REST API Reference.  Use the link in the sCE support tab to access that.

I want to add a little to my earlier entry on the use of the Firefox plug-in Poster to call the SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) REST APIs for managing cloud resources.  In the entry Firefox Poster Add-On for Cloud REST APIs I introduced  the use of the Poster plug-in but I only gave an example for GET requests.  For POST and PUT requests you will need to add a HTTP method body. The SCE REST API expects parameters in a form-encoded body.  You can add these easily with Poster.  It can also help give you an understanding of the REST API.

Here are the steps to create a storage volume. You need find out the values parameters to add first by doing a GET for volume offerings

 

2. Add the User-Agent header as per the GET method.
5. Change to the Parameters tab and enter the parameter names and values for name, offeringID, location, format, and size.  Optionally, you can add a storage area ID (storageAreaID) as well.

6. Change to the Content to Send tab and click the Body from Parameters button.  You should see something like the screen shown below.

 

7.Click the POST button.  This will send a HTTP POST to the cloud server. After about 20-30 seconds you should see response like shown below.

 

 

 

8. Take a note of the volume ID.  You will need it to check the status of the storage volume.
9. You will not be able to use the storage volume until it changes to the UNMOUNTED state. Do a GET request to the same URL to check the status.

 

There are several SCE recently added commands and APIs that I would like to highlight.

 

Find image by name
This provides a way to list image details by the name of the image.  The command line flavor is:

 

ic-describe-images -u|--username username -w|--passphrase passphrase -g|--file-path filepath [-N|--imageName imageName] [-y|--ignoreAdditionalInfo] [-h|--help]

 

The -N imageName option specifies the name of the image to search for.  Because multiple images in the the catalog can conceivably have the same name, say for different data centers, the return result can bring back a list of matches.  Enclose the name in double quotes if it contains spaces or special characters.

 

The REST flavor of this API is

GET <base_URL>/offerings/image/?imageName=<imageName>

The equivalent Java API is defined on the DeveloperCloudClient interface is

 

List<Image> describeImages(String name)

 

User management
There are provisional API's now available for adding and deleting user.

 

Find address by ID
There is a new API for find IP address by ID.

 

More information
For more information about the APIs and commands see the following resources linked from the Support Tab in SCE (https://www-147.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise)
SmartCluod Enterprise REST API Reference, http://tinyurl.com/bqm4oyl

SmartCluod Enterprise Java API Javadoc, http://tinyurl.com/cscyqux

SmartCluod Enterprise Command Line Tool Reference, http://tinyurl.com/chvpcsg

 

Also see the book  Developing and Hosting Applications on the Cloud, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008FP2G5O.

SmartCloud Enerprise (SCE) has a facility for uploading files when creating a virtual machine.  One of the scenarios that this is very useful for is to upload additional SSH keys, say to provide a backk-up or to allow the virtual machine to be used by multiple people.  I created a document to explain how this is done.  The URL of the document is:

 

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP102147

 

This document describes working with parameters that are required when creating instances with the command line and the Java API. It also discusses how to pass files to the Cloud during instance provisioning with Java API and REST API. (Uploading files is not supported by the command line tool.)

 

More details on related topics at  Developing and Hosting Applications on the Cloud, IBM Press link:

http://www.ibmpressbooks.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=9780133066845

 

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008FP2G5O