Solved: CloudCenter deployment without the agent

Paul Jeffrey · ‎07-04-2017

Hi All

Is one able to perform a CloudCenter deployment without making use of the agent? If so, what are the limitations of not using the agent?

Reason for the question is that the customer we are deploying at has some very strict security requirements and has concerns on the agent being able to execute unwanted commands within the environment.

Thanks in advance,

Paul

micdavi3 · ‎07-17-2017

Paul, there are two limitations of not running the agent:

1. CloudCenter will not be able to run any commands from within the VM. Fortunately it sounds like this is a requirement rather than a limitation for your customer.

2. CloudCenter will not be able to gather performance metrics from the VM to enable the auto-scaling feature. Manual or API based scaling still works though, so if the customer is using other performance monitoring tools they could still use those tools to automatically scale the app using our scaling API call if they want to.

Note that limitation #1 has the knock-on issue of application deployment beyond base-OS. The way apps are usually modeled in CloudCenter uses the agent to run the installation commands in the VM. The customer should think about how they would do that otherwise, for example using CloudCenter to trigger a build using Chef, Puppet, Ansible or the like to do the application build. We have quite a few customers doing this as well.

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somakuma · ‎07-11-2017

Hello Paul,

Once you have successfully configured the cloudcenter you have the option in cloudcenter UI to create your own service without the agent & then you can deploy the same by using in your modeled app.

Thanks,

Naveen

Paul Jeffrey · ‎07-17-2017

Hi Naveen

Thanks, I was able to configure the service without an agent, I think more of what the customer was looking to understand is what the different capabilities are between the agent and agent-less service. We have however gotten a response on an internal mailer which seems to help out.

Regards,

Paul

micdavi3 · ‎07-17-2017

Paul, there are two limitations of not running the agent:

1. CloudCenter will not be able to run any commands from within the VM. Fortunately it sounds like this is a requirement rather than a limitation for your customer.

2. CloudCenter will not be able to gather performance metrics from the VM to enable the auto-scaling feature. Manual or API based scaling still works though, so if the customer is using other performance monitoring tools they could still use those tools to automatically scale the app using our scaling API call if they want to.

Note that limitation #1 has the knock-on issue of application deployment beyond base-OS. The way apps are usually modeled in CloudCenter uses the agent to run the installation commands in the VM. The customer should think about how they would do that otherwise, for example using CloudCenter to trigger a build using Chef, Puppet, Ansible or the like to do the application build. We have quite a few customers doing this as well.

Paul Jeffrey · ‎07-17-2017

Hi Michael

Thank you for the overview, will certainly need to look at the approach for application deployment/configuration if going the agent-less route based on your additional note.

Regards,

Paul