Getting Started with Trystack

Trystack has STOPPED its service already.

OpenStack is one of the most popular Cloud Operating System. However, it has become complex mass of multiple sub-projects. It contains 5-6 primary sub-projects and at least 5-7 more additional services along with new services and projects in the pipeline. As such, getting started with custom development can be fairly challenging.

To get a workable Openstack cloud, powerful hardware infrastructure and configuration for above sub-projects are the big stones in the road. You may get happiness to make it work from scratch, but Trystack removes above complexity and makes it easy and free for everyone to experiment with the cloud.

Apply an account for Trystack

In order to log in with the Facebook link, you must be a member of the TryStack Facebook group. Join in the group is a manual approval, so it may take a little time for you to get access to TryStack. Please be patient.

When you got the approval, you may login with facebook account link.

Above application is for x86 zone. To get an account for ARM zone, you’ll need to subscriber through a newsletter

Create Key Pairs

When launching a virtual machine, a key pair need to be injected, which provides SSH access to your instance. For this to work, the image must contain the cloud-init package.

You can create at least one key pair for each project. You can use the key pair for multiple instances that belong to that project. If you generate a key pair with an external tool, you can import it into OpenStack. A key pair belongs to an individual user, not to a project. To share a key pair across multiple users, each user needs to import that key pair.

If you choose to create a totally new key pair, after downloading the private SSH key pem file, remember to change the file permission to -r-------- (400). This is important for later use with SSH command line tool.

If you choose to re-use already created SSH key pairs, use “Import Key Pair” and paste the public key content in the right box.

For later reference, I created a new key pair named trystack and keep the downloaded trystack.pem.

Create Network

This allows users to set up and define network connectivity and addressing in the cloud.

1. In Network tab

• Naming the Network Name with internal

2. In Subnet tab

• Naming the Subnet Name with sub1
• Filling Network Address with appropriate CIDR,192.168.1.0/24.
• Keeping IP Version with IPv4

3. In Subnet Details tab

• Filling 8.8.8.8 (Google public DNS) for DNS Name Servers

4. Submit with Create Button

Create Instances

An instance is a VM that OpenStack provisions on a compute node.

1. In Detail tab

• Naming Instance Name with beijing
• Using m1.small with Flavor
• Filling 3 with Instance Count (Quota is max used now)
• Using Boot from image with Instance Boot Source
• Using Ubuntu 16.04 (289.3 MB) with Image Name

2. In Access & Security tab

• Making sure default security group is checked

3. In Networking tab

• Making sure internal network is selected

4. Submit with Create Button

Create Router

We already created network, but it is isolated from the Internet. To make our network has an internet connection, we need a router that running as the gateway to the Internet.

But the router is still not connected with our internal network.

Now the router is still not connected with outworld. Make it as the gateway.

Until now the router connects both the private internal and the public Internet

Request and Associate Floating IP

The created instances beijing-1, beijing-2 and beijing-3 already have their allocated IP from the internal DHCP pool. They can access the Internet with router1 as gateway. However, we cannot access the instances created, they do not have public IP that we can acess from the Internet. We need request a public IP address and associcate it with the instances.

The quota shows we can only allocate ONE from public pool. So only ONE instance can be associated with this public IP.

Allow SSH connection to the instance VM

A security group is a named collection of network access rules that are use to limit the types of traffic that have access to instances. When you launch an instance, you can assign one or more security groups to it. If you do not create security groups, new instances are automatically assigned to the default security group, unless you explicitly specify a different security group.

The associated rules in each security group control the traffic to instances in the group. Any incoming traffic that is not matched by a rule is denied access by default. You can add rules to or remove rules from a security group, and you can modify rules for the default and any other security group.

With above settings, we can use the downloaded SSH private key named trystack.pem (step 2) and allocated public IP 8.43.86.142 (step 6) to connect with instance beijing-1

$ ssh -i trystack.pem ubuntu@8.43.86.142

Now we have a VM with SSH connection in the trystack cloud. If you want to access beijing-2 and beijing-3, try to SSH these instances from beijing-1.

Trystack Limitation

There is something more need to mention here. TryStack resembles the type of cloud environment you can create on your own with OpenStack Software. However, there is a few sensible limits in place for the good of the project. First, the server instances you launch are only available for 24 hours until the hardware is reclaimed for use by new instances. And more, when you first get your account, it will be preloaded with a limited quota. As a user account rather than admin, Keystone is NOT allowed to use for quota changing. This is something like you can only allocate ONE public IP, no more than 3 VMs etc…

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