The Codeyourinfra project brings solutions for common sysadmin problems. The proposed solutions use Ubuntu images previously built. In this repository you'll find all the code developed for automatically building the Codeyourinfra Vagrant boxes and the Codeyourinfra AWS AMIs.
During the building process, a temporary VM is initialized from a base image, and then provisioned by Ansible. The same Ansible playbook is used to provision both the VM initialized for building the Vagrant box and the one for building the AWS AMI.
The docker image's building process, for example, is represented below:
In the article Choosing between baked and fried provisioning, some advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are presented. The following table lists their characteristics:
| Baked images | Fried provisioning |
|---|---|
| Ready to use | Requires provisioning |
| Requires more storage | Requires less storage |
| The image is versioned | The provisioning code is versioned |
In a nutshell, if you have enough resources to keep your baked images, save time with them. Build your images in advance and use them right away as required.
The Codeyourinfra Vagrant boxes are available at Vagrant Cloud, in https://app.vagrantup.com/codeyourinfra. The currently used base Vagrant box is the latest ubuntu/bionic64. Run the following command to build and deploy the new custom Vagrant box to Vagrant Cloud:
./build-and-deploy.sh <image_id>
The image_id parameter can be set to docker, jenkins, monitor or repo. In addition to that, the shell script requires the environment variable VAGRANT_CLOUD_TOKEN. To set it, you must have defined a token in Vagrant Cloud. Last but not least, don't forget to install Vagrant (minimum version: 2.2.0) and VirtualBox!
The Codeyourinfra AWS AMIs are currently available in 2 regions: South America - São Paulo (sa-east-1) and Europe - London (eu-west-2). They can be found by using the AWS CLI tool, executing the following command (replace the region parameter with the appropriate value):
aws ec2 describe-images --owners 334305766942 --region <region> \
--query 'Images[*].[Name,ImageId]' --output textTheir building processes are performed by Packer. During the process, Packer finds the latest available Canonical Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in the region sa-east-1, to be used as the base image. With the command below you can find it too:
aws ec2 describe-images --owners 099720109477 --region sa-east-1 \
--filters "Name=name,Values=ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-bionic-18.04-amd64-server-*" \
--query 'Images[*].[ImageId,CreationDate]' --output text | sort -k2 -r | head -n1Before building the images, get the right credentials, through the AWS IAM. You must set the environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY in order to run, from the image folder:
packer build aws-ami.json