OpenShift Origin on Fedora 24 on AWS - Wow.

So, this all started because I was just doing a little Friday tinkering and wanted to see how easy it is to get OpenShift Origin installed on Fedora... on AWS.  Well, it turns out, it's really, really easy.  So easy, in fact, that I decided to write it down here and share it with you. This will be the first of a few blog posts about running OpenShift Origin on Fedora.  This post details how to get OpenShift Origin running on a single instance of Fedora 24. This is also a manual configuration.  In future blog posts, I'll talk about how to set up a highly available OpenShift Origin install on Fedora.  In addition, I'll talk about how to consume AWS resources like ELBs, IAM, S3, route53, ec2 instances, etc...  Just maybe, I'll go into how to automate the deployments with the AWS CLI.  Feel free to leave some comments on just how far you want to go here.  I promise, it will be fun.

 I learned quite a bit during this process, namely:

• You can easily find and use Fedora images in the AWS community AMIs.
• OpenShift Origin has been packaged for Fedora 24 - who doesn't like new?
• It's easy to install the OpenShift Origin PaaS and get started.

The goal was to get Origin running on AWS, launch an application, and hit that app from my browser.  There's no real pre-requisites to get started here other than an AWS account with the proper permissions.  I do happen to have a DNS name managed by AWS route53 which helps a bit.  I also have some prior knowledge of how AWS works.

Let's chat a bit about what I'm using, what I had set up before this, and what I had to do to meet my goal.  I am using:

• Fedora AMI with the ID of ami-0a09e667 (Fedora-Cloud-Base-24-20160512.n.0.x86_64-us-east-1-HVM-standard-0). 
• For my testing, I'm using a m4.2xlarge instance of that AMI.
• I had an existing VPC that I launched the Fedora 24 instance into.  The only things to know about that is that I have DNS hostnames enabled on that VPC.
• I have an existing subnet in that VPC that I launched this into.
• I have an existing route table in that VPC with an internet gateway defined so my instance can get out.
• I created a new security group on instance launch for testing this.

I do need to prep AWS a bit before moving on.  I'll use the AWS CLI to do this.  I do have an AWS CLI cheat sheet that may help if you have questions about querying resources, launching resources, describing, etc.. Have a look.  To move forward, I need to know what OpenShift Origin needs.  I found that the OpenShift Origin documentation is great. Please have a look if you have any questions.  That's what I did. I went to the docs | installing | prerequisites and started there.  I'll just walk through the prerequisites here and share what I did.

Testing out AWS ssm

I was poking around the AWS CLI and testing out different features / functionality.  Amazons ssm caught my eye.  I decided to have a look at the remote functionality offered by this tool.  I'm consolidating all the notes I found in different resources here, to do a simple test.  Here's a high level overview of what it took me to get this configured and working properly:

1. Create a role and policy and assign that to an EC2 instance at launch time. You can't assign it to a running instance. The policy I assigned to the role that I attached to the instance is called: AmazonEC2RoleforSSM

2. Assign permissions to the user that will be executing the commands. The name of the policy is: AmazonSSMFullAccess

Of course, for your environment, make sure you adhere to your security requirements.  There are better ways to restrict this.

3. Deploy the instance and install the ssm agent.  You can either install the agent by passing  user-data or manually afterwards.  It's a a simple rpm package.

4. Create a policy document, mine was:

       
{
     "schemaVersion": "1.2",
     "description": "Check ip configuration of a Linux instance.",
     "parameters": {
     },
     "runtimeConfig": {
       "aws:runShellScript": {
       "properties": [
       {
       "id": "0.aws:runShellScript",
       "runCommand": 
    }
   ]
  }
 }
}

From the examples here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/create-ssm-doc.html

Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) - Cheat Sheet

I have been standing up quite a bit of infrastructure in AWS lately using the AWS CLI.  Here are some commands that I found helpful in a cheat sheet format. I'll show you how to create resources, query resources for information and how to update resources. Hopefully this will get you started quickly. The cheat sheet covers the following topics:

• Setting up your environment.
• Working with Virtual Private Clouds (VPC).
• Working with Identity and Access Management (IAM).
• Working with Route53.
• Working with Elastic Load Balancers (ELB).
• Working with SSH.
• Working with DHCP.
• Working with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
• Utilizing queries to gather information.

You can download the AWS CLI cheat sheet here.

You can preview the AWS CLI cheat sheet by clicking below (hover mouse over upper right corner):

You can test all these commands with Fedora images which can be launched here: https://getfedora.org/cloud/download/.

If you have any questions about any of the commands in particular, please drop a comment below and I'll try to help.  Much credit goes to Ryan Cook for frontloading a lot of this.