ApacheCon NA 2016 jclouds demo

The ACNA 2016 demo is an application that deploys nodes to a given cloud provider, and uses Chef for configuration management and service discovery. If you don't have a Chef Server, you can try this demo for free with a Hosted Chef account.

## Configuring the Chef Server

First of all, the Chef Server must have the cookbooks and roles that will be used in this example application. In order to do that, you need to have the knife CLI installed on your machine. If you don't have it, you can download and install Chef from here.

Once the Chef CLI is installed, you can upload everything to the Chef Server as follows:

gem install Berkshelf    # Cookbook manager used to manage cookbook dependencies
cd chef
berks install            # Download the cookbooks and their dependencies
berks upload             # Upload everything to your Chef Server

Once the cookbooks are installed, the roles and environments need to be uploaded to the Chef Server too:

knife environment from file environments/*
knife role from file roles/*

Now the Chef Server has all it needs for the demo.

Configuring the connection to the cloud providers

To configure the connection to a cloud provider, create a file in the format <provider-id>.properties in the src/main/resources directory. The file must contain two keys:

<provider-id>.identity = <identity used to connect to the provider>
<provider-id>.credential = <credential used to connect to the provider>

Values can also be path to files that contain the credential. This makes it easier to provide private keys, and avoids exposing the credentials if the file is uploaded to a version control system.

You will also have to change the chef.properties file to point to your Chef Server.