Getting Started With Rackspace

Rackspace is a major public cloud platform and is one of the core platforms that Salt Cloud has been built to support.

Set up the cloud config at /etc/salt/cloud:

# Set up an optional default cloud provider
#
provider: openstack

# Set the location of the salt-master
#
minion:
    master: saltmaster.example.com

# Configure Rackspace using the OpenStack plugin
#
OPENSTACK.identity_url: 'https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens'
OPENSTACK.compute_name: cloudServersOpenStack
OPENSTACK.protocol: ipv4

# Set the compute region:
#
OPENSTACK.compute_region: DFW

# Configure Rackspace authentication credentials
#
OPENSTACK.user: myname
OPENSTACK.tenant: 123456
OPENSTACK.apikey: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Compute Region

Rackspace currently has three compute regions which may be used:

Authentication

The user is the same user as is used to log into the Rackspace Control Panel. The tenant and apikey can be found in the API Keys area of the Control Panel. The apikey will be labeled as API Key (and may need to be generated), and tenant will be labeled as Cloud Account Number.

An initial profile will be configured in /etc/salt/cloud.profiles:

openstack_512:
    provider: openstack
    size: 512MB Standard Instance
    image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

To instantiate a machine based on this profile:

# salt-cloud -p openstack_512 myinstance

This will create a virtual machine at Rackspace with the name myinstance. This operation may take several minutes to complete, depending on the current load at the Rackspace data center.

Once the instance has been created with salt-minion installed, connectivity to it can be verified with Salt:

# salt myinstance test.ping

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