I’ve been working on another project when I get motivated to do so, the project is a RaspberryPi enclosure set that turns RaspberryPis or other single board computers into a sort of blade chassis. Part of this project is to sort of have an openstack like aproach to managing it. Sort of like a rPiaas (RaspberryPi as a Service) with an IaaS component.
A while ago I wrote a slack bot where I worked that allowed the dev team to interact with our ConcourseCI instance set up in an isolated VPC in AWS. This bot did other things too, like allowing them to check AWS VGW VPN status, Pingdom status, and GitHub release versions. All of which were useful at the time.
Our Concourse also had notify on job failure and success, but this is only so helpful. Being able to trigger a job from slack made it so much better.
I recently posted about running Openstack at home, and how I used the RDO project. Well things changed.
I want to be able to play with BOSH at home better. Leverage similar components that I can get from AWS/Azure/GCP like load balancing, network file shares, s3 compatable buckets, etc… I need Openstack.
I originally deployed Openstack onto a single Dell R720 and used it to deploy some custom BOSH releases I had been working on. But the electricity and heat it produced was too high. Electricity is not cheap in Australia. So I turned it off.
I’ve been playing around with BUCC (https://github.com/starkandwayne/bucc) which is a really cool and easy way to deploy a BOSH director with UAA, Concourse, and Credhub. And I started thinking about how hard it is for not-so-technical people to update credentials, or retrieve credentials from Credhub. Not everyone is good with the CLI tools, or can’t use them due to workstations, but they can access a VPN and use a browser.
I got sick of typing out long commands for fly when doing development work with my concourse pipelines, so I wrote a wrapper for it called MACH.
Deploying ConcourseCI with BOSH is easy, and there is a lot of information out there about it and how to make it work.
I’ll go through how I deploy concourse locally for testing. I deploy to a director that is running locally in virtualbox
First thing we need to do is make sure that our director has some resources and the right stemcell. The fastest way to get these is to use bosh.io, so lets load the stemcell in first.
In this tutorial, we are going to start up a local BOSHLite director in VirtualBox.