Create your own fleet of servers with Digital Ocean and salt-cloud

Have you heard about Digital Ocean? They offer a polished user interface, KVM guests with SSD storage, and an API to interact with a cloud of hypervisors. API integration got you down? Don't worry, salt-cloud has already integrated Digital Ocean among it's list of providers! The rest of this post illustrates the steps I took to configure salt-cloud to work with Digital Ocean.

This guide assumes you already have a:

• salt-master
• Digital Ocean account.

Step one, install the most recent version of salt-cloud.

On the salt-master:

sudo apt-get install salt-cloud

# or if you prefer ...
pip install salt-cloud==2015.5.0

# last verify it was successfully installed
salt-cloud --version

Step two, configure salt-cloud.

Salt-cloud uses the following files YAML files for configuration:

/etc/salt/cloud.conf.d/main.conf:

This is the main configuration file. I have the following statements:

minion:
    master: master.foxhop.net
    append_domain: foxhop.net

/etc/salt/cloud.providers/do.conf:

This is a provider configuration file for Digital Ocean (do). Collect your client_key and personal_access_token (api_key) from the Digital Ocean user dashboard. Also create an SSH key and add the public key using the dashboard:

# For Digital Ocean
do:
  provider: digital_ocean
  client_key: MyClientKeyLiftedFromDashboard
  personal_access_token: MyAPIKeyLiftedFromDashboard
  ssh_key_file: /keys/digital-ocean-salt-cloud
  ssh_key_name: digital-ocean-salt-cloud.pub

/etc/salt/cloud.profiles/do.conf:

This is the Digital Ocean profiles configuration file. We will create just two profiles for now, but you can create unlimited named combinations.

ubuntu-12-04-do-512:
  provider: do
  image: ubuntu-12-04-x64
  size: 512mb
  location: nyc1

ubuntu-14-04-do-512:
  provider: do
  image: ubuntu-14-04-x64
  size: 512mb
  location: nyc1

ssh_key_file:

This is your private SSH key located on your salt-master

ssh_key_name:

This is the name of the public key you added in your Digital Ocean dashboard

size:

The size or plan you would like to provision, 512mb is the smallest plan

location:

The geographical region, location, and/or data center

image:

The operating system image

After you configure the do provider in /etc/salt/cloud.providers you gain access to the following commands:

salt-cloud --list-sizes do
salt-cloud --list-locations do
salt-cloud --list-images do
salt-cloud --help

Lets provision a new cloud server!

salt-cloud --profile ubuntu-14-04-do-512 deejay

If all goes well you should have a newly provisioned server bootstrapped with salt-minion. The new minion's keys are already added to the salt-master. Now you just need to run highstate!