What is Autostrap?
Autostrap is a framework for deploying, configuring and orchestrating a set of virtual or physical machines that act in concert to provide a service, such as a web shop. It consists of known-good sample configuration for a range of services, sample Heat templates for service clouds (or stacks, as Heat terms them) of one or more machines providing these services, and a set of bootstrapping scripts for setting the machines up for Puppet configuration. It is designed to be easily extended with user or project specific configuration and Puppet code. All components are available under an Apache 2.0 license.
Autostrap has been developed and tested on Ubuntu 14.04. It may work for other Debian flavoured systems, but none have been tested so far.
Environment
Cloudstrap can either run standalone on any Ubuntu 14.04 system with an Internet connection or it can be launched through Openstack's Heat orchestration tool. Porting to Cloud environments other than Openstack should not pose too great a challenge, but so far this has not been put to the test.
History
Autostrap started out as an internal Project at Syseleven, where it was used to configure various services running as Heat stacks on Syseleven's Openstack cloud. While it eventually turned out not to be ideal for Syseleven's intended use in managed hosting, it is nonetheless a very useful tool for building infrastructure automatically and reproducibly. Syseleven kindly gave permission to release the code base to the community, the results of which you are looking at now.
How to Read this Document
If you are entirely new to Autostrap, we recommend starting with the Components and Entry Points sections. The former will give you an overview of what components Autostrap consists of, the latter will give you an idea of how and where you can kick off the bootstrapping process. Once you are through with these two sections it's probably best to take some time to read Life of a Stack. It will give you a birds-eye overview of how Autostrap bootstraps a blank VM to a point where it can run puppet.
After that, it's probably best to get your hands dirty and follow the instructions in the Deployment Workflow section to deploy your first Autostrap based service stack.
Finally, you will find detailed reference documentation in the following sections:
| Configuration Sources | Discusses all knobs and dials available for configuring Autostrap in detail. Be sure to read this section before building a Autostrap based production setup. |
| Glossary | A glossary of terms we use in this document. |
| How do I... | Short howto guides for various common tasks. |
Contact and Contributions
For now, use our IRC channel #autostrap on
FreeNode to get in touch. We do not have a mailing
list, yet. For Bug reports/feature requests, please raise an issue on
our Github page.
There is no formal contribution process right now. Just submit a pull request on Github. We recommend discussing large and/or breaking changes in the IRC channel first.