These instructions should be a nice and easy start to deploying Rackspace Cloud servers using the salt-cloud tool. Just follow along exactly, and at the end you should have a fully functional salt-cloud deployment tool.

Dependencies

I’m performing my installation on a Debian 7 (Wheezy) server, where my salt-master already exists. The following two commands should install salt-cloud, and all the necessary dependencies. This assumes you are already using the Python tool pip.

This article is in response to a request by Ryan Jung. Request your own article.

One of the disadvantages of using IRC over another chat medium is the lack of logging while you aren’t connected to the server. In this article, I will describe the process I used to implement logging for my favorite IRC channels.

The Environment

Pierc is my choice of logging bot for this article. It logs the contents of IRC channels to a MySQL instance, and presents an easy to use web interface.

This article is in response to a request by Shawn Laasch and Jordan Rinke. Request your topic today! This article will focus on Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers .

Cloud Load Balancers

Load balancing is performed by a device or service acting as a single endpoint to your application or site. This device then spreads the requests it receives across multiple back end nodes. There are benefits to using a load balancer in your configuration:

Following proper coding standards is important to ensure others can read and modify your code. I make use of the following tools when writing Python to ensure I am formatting my code properly.

Install Dependencies

Let’s start by installing a dependency of the Vim plugin we are going to use. The Flake8 module will be needed for our vim-flake8 setup. As root (or using sudo), run the following commands:

easy_install pip
pip install flake8

The first command installs the latest version of pip , a tool for installing and managing Python packages. The second command uses pip to install the flake8 package. Now let’s configure vim.

My initial draft of the cf_pyrax.py script used in my automation deleted all the contents of a Cloud Files container, and then re-uploaded this content. This process was inefficient and also caused issues loading the site while this process was running.

I have now updated this script to use the new sync_folder_to_container method from pyrax. This method was introduced to pyrax in this commit . Make sure you update your pyrax modules before using this new script.