How to Test Drive Cloudify with the Online Widget

The Cloudify widget is a fast way to try out Cloudify without installing anything locally or bootstrapping a manager.
Cloudify is a cloud orchestrator based on TOSCA.
With it you can manage your resources using virtually any cloud provider. The hub of your orchestration takes place through the Cloudify manager.

Cloudify is Pure-Play Cloud Orchestration based on TOSCA. Get it here.  Go

With the widget, you get 120 minutes with a Cloudify manager, the console, and the command line.
Go to http://www.getcloudify.org/widget.html and input your name and your email address to get started.
Upon initialization, we give you the public IP address of your Cloudify manager. You can open up the UI in a browser or click “try out the interactive shell”.

Manager UI

The manager is preloaded with a blueprint for the Nodecellar application.

Blueprints

A blueprint is a yaml document that describes an application. Each node can contain application components, as well as virtual hosts, a security groups, key pairs, IP addresses, or other cloud resources.
The Nodecellar application presents a wines inventory, and you can play with it to add, edit, and delete wines. The Nodecellar blueprint contains a virtual host, a NodeJS server, a Mongo database, and a public IP.
Point your browser to the public IP of your manager. The screen will show the blueprints tab. You can click on the blueprint to explore its topology, see a list of the nodes it describes, and view the files in the blueprint archive.
Any file in the blueprint archive can be used by the blueprint. For example, if you want to map one of your node’s lifecycle operations to a custom script, you can include that script in the blueprint archive.

Deployments

A deployment is a virtual environment on the manager. It contains all of the packages and instructions that the manager needs to create your application infrastructure.
Return to the blueprints tab home screen and click “create deployment”. A dialog box opens. Give the deployment a name.
You also have the ability to provide inputs for the blueprint, if any are defined. You can use the text entry boxes, or a JSON blob.
Click create.
The screen transitions to the deployments tab, an initialization indicator and event log.
When the initialization is complete, you can explore the topology, a network diagram, a list of nodes and their properties, an execution history, and a monitoring tab.
The information in these menus will be updated over your deployment’s lifecycle.
You also are presented with a list of available workflows. Select install from the the workflow drop down. Click start, and confirm.
The install workflow is the stage is your deployment’s lifecycle, where all of the instructions about your application’s creation and configuration are executed.
While the install workflow is running, you can keep track of the progress in the events log.
There is also a app status indicator in the top right hand corner.
When the execution is completed, you will see a message indicating its success or failure in the event log.
You can navigate to port 8080 on the manager IP to play with the Nodecellar application.

Interactive Shell

Return to the widget home screen and try out the Cloudify command line tools. Click the link that says “try out the interactive shell”.
It’s important to know which version of Cloudify you are running.
$ cfy --version
Also you can check the status of the services that are running in your manager:
$ cfy status
You get a list of blueprints by typing:
$ cfy blueprints list
You can get a list of deployments by typing:
$ cfy deployments list
You can get a list of a deployments executions by typing:
$ cfy executions list -d {a deployment id}
You can get the event list for an execution:
$ cfy events list -e {event-id}
You can toggle the log level of the event list:
$ cfy events list -e {event-id} -l
$ cfy events list -e {event-id} -v
$ cfy events list -e {event-id} —debug
These are the basic commands that you will need to know in order to find your way around the Cloudify command line.
You can also add the “-h” flag anytime you need a little guidance:
$ cfy events list -h
Let’s say you want to create a deployment of the same blueprint earlier, from the command line:
$ cfy deployments create -b nodecellar1 -d my_nodecellar_deployment -i ‘{ “agent_user”: “ubuntu”, “image_id”: “your-cloudify-ubuntu-14.04-image”, “flavor_id”: “your-image-size”}’
This does exactly the same as clicking “create deployment” in the UI steps above.

Conclusion

This blog shows the basics for using the Cloudify Widget. From here, it’s a good idea to explore Getting Started with Cloudify: /guide/3.2/quickstart.html, where you will download our Vagrant box.
There you will:

• Bootstrap your own manager
• Have the ability to edit the blueprints

From there, try out the Docker Nodecellar blueprint, to get an idea of how you can use containers with Cloudify:
https://github.com/cloudify-cosmo/cloudify-nodecellar-example/tree/3.2