The infrastrucure middleman
Broker is a tool designed to provide a common interface between one or many services that provision virtual machines. It is an abstraction layer that allows you to ignore (most) of the implementation details and just get what you need.
dnf install cmake
cd <broker root directory>
pip install .
cp broker_settings.yaml.example broker_settings.yaml
Then edit the broker_settings.yaml file
Broker can also be ran outside of its base directory. In order to do so, specify the directory broker's files are in with the
BROKER_DIRECTORY envronment variable.
BROKER_DIRECTORY=/home/jake/Programming/broker/ broker inventory
Checking out a VM
broker checkout --workflow "workflow-name" --workflow-arg1 something --workflow-arg2 else
You can pass in any arbitrary arguments you want. Broker can also checkout multiple VMs at once by specifying a count.
broker checkout --nick rhel7 --count 3
Nicks
Broker allows you to define configurable nicknames for checking out vms. Just add yours to setting.yaml and call with the --nick option
broker checkout --nick rhel7
Duplicating a VM
Broker offers another shortcut for checking out a VM with the same recipe as one already checked out by Broker. This is via the duplicate command.
broker duplicate my.awesome.vm.com
broker duplicate 0
broker duplicate 1 3
broker duplicate 0 --count 2
Listing your VMs
Broker maintains a local inventory of the VMs you've checked out. You can see these with the inventory command.
broker inventory
To sync your inventory from a supported provider, use the --sync option.
broker inventory --sync AnsibleTower
Extending your VM lease time*
Providers supporting extending a VM's lease time make that functionality available through the extend subcommand.
broker extend 0
broker extend hostname
broker extend vmname
broker extend --all
Checking in VMs
You can also return a VM to its provider with the checkin command.
You may use either the local id (broker inventory), the hostname, or "all" to checkin everything.
broker checkin my.host.fqdn.com
broker checkin 0
broker checkin 1 3 my.host.fqdn.com
broker checkin --all
Creating nicks
Broker will attempt to help your create your own nicks with the nick-help command.
If supported by your chosen provider, nick-help will display the additional arguments you can use when defining a new nick.
broker nick-help --help
broker nick-help --workflow my-awesome-workflow
Additionally, if you're unfamiliar with what actions are supported by your provider, you can get a list by passing the provider's name.
broker nick-help --provider AnsibleTower
Run arbitrary actions If a provider action doesn't result in a host creation/removal, Broker allows you to execute that action as well. There are a few output options available as well.
broker execute --help
broker execute --workflow my-awesome-workflow --additional-arg True
broker execute -o raw --workflow my-awesome-workflow --additional-arg True
broker execute -o raw --workflow my-awesome-workflow --additional-arg True --artifacts last
Run Broker in the background Certain Broker actions can be run in the background, these currently are: checkout, checkin, duplicate, and execute. When running a command in this mode, it will spin up a new Broker process and no longer log to stderr. To check progress, you can still follow broker's log file. Note that background mode will interfere with output options for execute since it won't be able to print to stdout. Those should kept in log mode.
broker checkout --background --nick rhel7
broker checkin -b --all
broker duplicate -b 0
broker execute -b --workflow my-awesome-workflow --artifacts