UseGalaxy.eu Terraform recipes for Pulsar Endpoint

The "virtual galaxy compute nodes" (VGCN) is a single very generic image which has all of the required components (pulsar, docker, singularity, autofs, CVMFS) to build a Pulsar Network endpoint with a condor cluster. The terraform plans in this repository define how these images can be deployed to OpenStack, install and configure the HTCondor cluster and, finally, properly configure Pulsar to accept job from Galaxy. You can read more about terraform on their site. scripts to launch VMs since those do not provide a declarative workflow.

When you deploy this onto your OpenStack, this is just a normal HTCondor cluster + NFS Server. The NFS server is included by default, but you can remove it and point the compute nodes at your own NFS server.

The terraform file defines three "resources":

• an NFS server
• a central manager
• one or more exec nodes

Each resource has a couple of different parameters, we have abstracted these into the vars.tf file where you can change them as you need.

Requirements

• An OpenStack Deployment where you want to launch VGCN
• API access to this OpenStack
• Terraform
• Ansible
• The latest VGGP image (here)

Setup

You will need to export the normal OpenStack environment variables, e.g.:

export OS_AUTH_URL=https://openstack.your.fqdn:5000/v2.0
export OS_TENANT_NAME=...
export OS_PASSWORD=...
export OS_PROJECT_NAME=...
export OS_REGION_NAME=...
export OS_TENANT_ID=...
export OS_USERNAME=...

You'll need to upload a VGCN image to your openstack, prebuilt versions are supplied by UseGalaxy.eu.

Next you'll want to customize some of the variables in vars.tf.

Variable	Default Value	Purpose
image	...	The name and the source url of the image to upload in your openstack environment
name_prefix	vgcn-	Prefixed to the name of the VMs that are launched
name_suffix	.usegalaxy.eu	This defaults to our domain, images do not need to be named as FQDNs but if you're using any sort of automated OpenStack DNS solution this can make things easier.
flavors	...	OpenStack flavors map that you will use to define resources of nova computing instances.
exec_node_count	2	Number of exec nodes.
public_key	...	SSH public key to use to access computing instances.
secgroups	...	We have built some default rules for network access. Currently these are extremely broad, we may change that in the future. Alternatively you can supply your own preferred security groups here.
network	galaxy-net	The network to connect the nodes to.
nfs_disk_size	3	NFS server disk size in GB.

If you want to disable the built-in NFS server and supply your own, simply:

1. Delete nfs.tf
2. Change every autofs entry to point to your mount points and your NFS server's name/ip address.

Configuring a new Pulsar endpoint

The workflow for deploying new pulsar endpoints would be now as follows:

1. Fork this repository
2. Change the vars.tf file in terraform.
3. Provide a SSH Key pair. The public key has to be configured in the vars.tf as public_key entry. The private key is needed in the terraform apply step.
4. Request RabbitMQ credentials from UseGalaxy.eu.
5. Launch the instance by applying terraform with the secrets: condor password, amqp string and path to your private key.

terraform apply -var "pvt_key=~/.ssh/<key>" -var "condor_pass=<condor-passord>" -var "mq_string=pyamqp://<pulsar>:<password>@mq.galaxyproject.eu:5671//pulsar/<pulsar>?ssl=1"

This way Pulsar will be deployed in one step and the secrets will not live in a terraform state file, they can be stored in a vault or password manager instead.

LICENSE

GPL