Intro to "Asgard"

Author : Pritiman Panda Intro to Asgard
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Pritiman Panda
http://thebpmfreak.wordpress.com

Agenda
 Introduction
 What is Asgard ? – a few definitions
 AWS Management Console vs Asgard
 Features provided by Asgard
 Asgard - Landscape
 Advantages of using Asgard
 Installation Steps
 Additional Info
 Things to be taken care of
 Reference Links

 We all must have heard about Netflix as one of the biggest Movie/TV Shows streaming site. But to
add on, it is also a game changer in the Technology front when it comes to experimenting and
advocating Open Source Products for Cloud based development and platforms.
 Lot of Innovation and thoughts come over from Netflix. Some companies take it up as a reference
model for their Architecture design, implementations and other cloud offerings
 Watch-out for latest happening at Netflix Tech Front - http://techblog.netflix.com/
Introduction

 “Asgard” - a web interface for application deployments and cloud management.
 Its a Self Service Tool used by Netflix for the past several years to deploy applications and services to the Amazon Cloud
 Asgard is also considered as Netflix's home-built open source tool manages Amazon workloads. To add on Netflix is one of the
biggest users of AWS.
 Asgard is named for the home of the Norse god of thunder and lightning, and since Asgard is where Netflix developers go to
control the clouds the name sounds appropriate
What is “Asgard “? – a few definitions
Amazon
Web Services
Access the AWS functionalities via
REST APIs
Asgard Web Interface

AWS Management Console v/s Asgard
Criteria AWS Management Console Asgard
Security
The credentials and the secret key has to be shared with
every developer for accessing the AWS account.
The credentials and the secret keys are configured in the
Config.groovy file at the Server end. The Asgard Portal can
be accessed at ease, without dwelling into the password
security management.
Logging and Audit
It is tough to debug and troubleshoot as the AWS does
not expose any log of recent user actions on an account.
Logging and Audit Trail are integrated with the Asgard
management system providing a lot of transparency and
detail.
Conventions
With multiple users accessing the cloud and incorporating
their changes, with no conventions, can end up in a
unlabelled clutter and expensive place
Asgard enforces naming conventions in order to keep the
cloud a saner place that is possible to audit and clean up
regularly as things get stale, messy, or forgotten
Integration
AWS being a closed system, there is no scope for any
integration touch points
Asgard being a open source product and console, provides a
lot of flexibility to make changes and integrate with other
external systems.
Automate Work Flow NA
Asgard provides an intelligent mechanism for the
deployment process wherein necessary steps can be
performed to enable or disable instances/ASGs and monitor
the Application Performance
To summarize, Asgard is the baby born out of the REST APIs exposed by AWS under the nursing of Netflix

Addressing to the pain points of the Amazon Web Service, Asgard provides
some of the following features based on the cloud management and cluster
maintenance interface :
 load balancing,
 auto-scaling,
 launching,
 security
 single view for managing services, organized around each
application
 maintains application registry in Amazon Simple DB
 duration each instance of the application has been running and
when it was created
 node details in a multi-node environment or cluster
 troublesome and infected nodes can be removed – rollback
 manage rolling push, in which all the nodes of a cluster can be
replaced one by one, without disrupting the operation of the
cluster as a whole
Features provided by Asgard

Asgard - Landscape
Business
Application

 Amazon Key or Account is required for every individual who wants to access the
cloud environment and make changes and development on the AWS cloud. With the
Asgard approach, the organization can help their employees to access the AWS
without sharing the credentials and keys.
 AWS lacks support for Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs). By leveraging ASG(provided by
Asgard) customers using AWS can provide reliability, redundancy, cost savings,
clustering, discoverability, ease of deployment, and the ability to roll back a bad
deployment quickly
 Asgard enforces conventions to make cloud a saner place, with the ability to audit
and clean up regularly as things get stale, messy, or forgotten. This prevents us from
making the cloud a unlabelled clutter, when accessed by multiple users in a Cloud
Environment
 AWS does not provide any Logging Mechanism from a user account and actions
perspective, this is where Asgard becomes handy providing a auditability to the
system.
 Integrating with some in-house or external systems. But point to note, this what
Netflix did by integrating with their inhouse systems like Jenkins and Discovery
systems. Need to confirm how it works out if we want to leverage this Integration
feature
 From an automated and intelligent deployment perspective, Asgard can provide
the multiple step approach to a single form submission.
 Simple REST APIs can be exposed and published, hiding the complex steps from the
user
Advantages of using Asgard

 Download the Asgard WAR from the link : http://netflix.github.com/asgard/
 Install Tomcat 6.x in your system
 Make the following Changes to the server.xml in the folder ~/Tomcat6/conf/
 https://github.com/Netflix/asgard/wiki/Tomcat-configuration
 Delete all the contents in the ~/Tomcat/webapps/ folder
 Copy the Asgard.war to the webapps folder
 Start the Server
 Hit the browser http://localhost:8080/init
 Login with your AWS ID and Secret key
Reference Link : https://github.com/Netflix/asgard/wiki/Quick-Start-Guide
Installation Steps

Snapshot

Where can I find the Source Code :
It has been open-sourced now and is available for public use and downloads at github
 http://github.com/Netflix/asgard
 http://netflix.github.com/asgard/
Licensing :
 Asgard is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 – play with the project and make improvements
Additional Info

Things to be taken care of
 Ensure that you have Java6 in your system (NOT Java 7, Asgard is not compatible with the Java 7 and throws exceptions)
 It works on Chrome, Firefox and other Browsers but NOT Internet Explorer

 http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html (ASGARD - Reference Screenshots and
reference for my slide content!! )
 Asgard, the Grails App that Deploys Netflix to the Cloud (Slides 2012)
 Building Cloud Tools for Netflix (Slides 2011)
 Building Cloud Tools for Netflix (Video 2011)
 Quick Start Installation Guide
 Trouble Shooting Installation
 REST-APIs
Please Note :
Most of the Contents in this Slide Deck are referenced from the Tech blogs at Netflix
Few Reference Links

‘am still exploring this Open Source offering and will keep enriching this content based on the learning. If you have
some thoughts and reference information in this context please feel free to share them across.
Happy Learning!! :-)
Thoughts
Image Source : koshercaffeine.blogspot.com

• http://www.freedigitalphotos.net for image
• that-figures.blogspot.com for image
• http://pschmidley.deviantart.com for image
• www.germangames.com for image
• http://techblog.netflix.com/
• www.refinery29.com for image
• karenpaynetableforone.wordpress.com for image
• www.bloggingcage.com for image

Intro to "Asgard"

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