BOSH CLI
The BOSH CLI is one of the most essential tools when developing and managing deployments in BOSH. A typical day involves someone saying "is Rabbit is down, can you look at it?" Of course they don’t tell me which environment or which rabbit version. So, here is my workflow to figure what is wrong:
Let’s find which rabbitmq first!
bosh vms rabbitmq-dev
bosh vms rabbitmq-sandbox
bosh vms rabbitmq-prod
Hmm, after reviewing the output it seems like all of them are "running". Guess it’s time to go on each VM and see if it’s running correct.
>bosh download deployment rabbitmq-dev rmqdev.yml
Unknown command: download deployment rabbitmq-dev
>bosh download manifest rabbitmq-dev rmqdev.yml
>bosh deployment rmqdev.yml
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/0 # Poke around and look at things
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/1 # Poke at this one too
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/2 # and this one...
...
Looks like dev is fine. Guess we try the remaining environments
>bosh download manifest rabbitmq-sandbox rmq-sandbox.yml
>bosh deployment rmq-sandbox.yml
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/0 # More looking around
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/1 # Still nothing
>bosh ssh rmq_z1/2 # yay, found something in logs on this one
After like 30 commands, I can finally start debugging! Yay!! Tedious but you eventually start helping.
Script all the things!
I also noticed that I was running a lot of commands just to SSH into a machine. (Also combining commands to create a wrong command). Because of my inability to type sometimes… I decided to make my life easier by making scripts!
quicksSSH.sh
bosh download manifest $1 $1-manifest.yml
bosh deployment $1-manifest.yml
bosh ssh
Not always helpful when pairing with someone else, you wind up having to manage generations of your scripting with a team.
BOSH Admin UI
Behold!! BUI :evil laugh:
At Stark & Wayne, we started working on an admin UI for BOSH.
Why? We believe in taking complex things and making it simple. Scripts were a nice first generation/triage but we like to have nice things and think you should too.
Here is an example of SSH to see bosh vms and and bosh ssh quickly.
BUI also gives me convenient way to glance at bosh information.
BUI can be easily run standalone or as another job on a BOSH director. Check out the standalone or boshrelease
This is still in the very early stages but it shows us the potential of what we can start doing to make our lives easier as BOSH operators. We would love to get community feedback and help! Let us know what you think!
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