Amazon EC2 Node Source

Available in Rundeck Enterprise

Amazon's EC2 (opens new window) (Elastic Cloud Compute) is a cloud service in wide use for dynamic infrastructure; it is easy to start up and shut down Node "Instances" in the cloud.

For Rundeck, we would like to have a way of querying the EC2 service to see what EC2 Instances are available for use as Rundeck Nodes.

Amazon has a well-defined API for communication with their services, which would allow us to pull out the EC2 data, and generate XML if we wanted to. We could write a script that produces that data and use that script on a server to produce data via a URL, or we could use that script with the script resource model source plugin to generate it. This would give us complete control of the output, but does require extra work.

However, there is already an Open Source plugin to do this: Rundeck EC2 Nodes Plugin (opens new window).

• rundeck-ec2-nodes-plugin (opens new window) project source code on GitHub.
• Download the binary distribution (opens new window).

Configuring

1. Copy the plugin file rundeck-ec2-nodes-plugin-1.2.jar into your $RDECK_BASE/libext directory. The plugin contains all of the required dependencies. (Already installed on Enterprise Edition)
2. Login to Rundeck with an administrator account, and browse to a project or create a new project.
3. Once inside a Project click Project Settings > Edit Nodes and choose Sources tab.
4. Click Add a New Node Source and select the AWS EC2 Resources type.
5. Enter the configuration details (see below) for the plugin and click Save.
6. Click Save for the full Node Source Configuration.

Minimal configuration details for the plugin includes your AWS access credentials you can find here https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home (opens new window)

Access Key ID

Specify your AWS Access key.

Secret Key

Specify your AWS Secret Key

Read about the other configuration details in the readme (opens new window) for the rundeck-ec2-nodes-plugin.

Filtering EC2 Results

It is possible to manage the set of Nodes that gets returned from the plugin by organizing EC2 instances using EC2 Tags, as well as adding EC2 Filters to the plugin configuration.

The EC2 plugin will automatically add tags for the nodes based on an EC2 Instance Tag named "Rundeck-Tags", as well as the Instance's state. Add "Mapping parameters" to the EC2 Plugin configuration to add additional tags.

Add filters to the EC2 Plugin configuration under the "Filter Params" configuration area, with the syntax of: filter=value;filter2=value2. The available filter names are listed in AWS API - DescribeInstances (opens new window).

Additional Information

More configuration is available for the rundeck-ec2-nodes-plugin project (opens new window).