Quick Start Guide

The goal of this quick start guide is to familiarize you with Cloudify in a few simple steps. For this purpose, we will use a Hello World application (an example application that is included in the Cloudify distribution file) to demonstrate the steps required to deploy an application on a local cloud.

This guide teaches you how to:

• Install the Cloudify Shell
• Bootstrap on a Local Cloud
• Deploy the Application
• Monitor the Application
• Uninstall the Application
• Teardown the Local Cloud

About the Hello World Application

The Hello World application presented in this guide is actually a war file that’s deployed on Tomcat.
All the binaries are located in the recipe folder, so you don’t need an Internet connection.
Once installed, this application displays several parameters, as shown in the following screenshot:

Step 1 – Install the Cloudify shell

This step describes how to install the Cloudify shell on your local machine.

Prerequisites

Before you install the Cloudify shell, make sure that your environment meets all the minimum requirements. For more information, see Cloudify Prerequisites.

To install the Cloudify shell

1. Install Java on your machine.
2. Download and unzip the Cloudify distribution file.
3. Go to the <cloudify installation folder>/bin folder, and then run cloudify.bat (Windows) or cloudify.sh (*nix) depending on the operating system running on your machine.

For more information, see Installing the Cloudify Shell.

Step 2 – Bootstrap on a Local Cloud

This step describes how to bootstrap Cloudify on a local cloud. A local cloud is a full-fledged cloud emulation environment that allows the user to run all Cloudify management and application services on a single machine.

To bootstrap on a local cloud, at the Cloudify shell prompt, type: bootstrap-localcloud

Your local cloud is now ready for deploying the helloworld application.
For more information about bootstrapping on a local cloud, see Boostrap a Local Cloud.

Step 3 – Deploy the Application

You can get the hello world application recipe in one of the following ways:

1. Download it from https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes/zipball/master
   and extract it to YOUR_LOCAL_ROOT_FOLDER.
2. In YOUR_LOCAL_ROOT_FOLDER, invoke the following command :
   git clone git@github.com:CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes.git

Now that the cloud is ready, let’s deploy the application. At the Cloudify shell prompt, type: install-application -timeout 10 YOUR_LOCAL_ROOT_FOLDER/recipes/apps/helloworld

Currently the Cloudify shell does not support backslashes so you must use a forward slash (/) as your path separator even if you are running on Windows.

In this example, we specified a timeout of 10 minutes (-timeout 10) to allow sufficient time for the recipe to install the application. Optionally, you may add the --verbose switch to display additional information during the installation process.

If an error occurs during installation, an error message is displayed and the installation is aborted. The error message will help you identify at which phase the problem occurred and for which service it.

Once the application installation has successfully completed, you can access the helloworld application by browsing to http://localhost:8080/helloworld.

Step 4 – Monitor the Application

To monitor the application, open a web browser, and then browse to the Web Management Console. Once the page is loaded, simply login anonymously without specifying a username or password.

You can find the exact URL displayed in the Cloudify shell when bootstrapping the local cloud. The default URL is http://localhost:8099.

Test the Cloudify web management console as follows:

• Click the Topology link, and then click on the Topology tab.
• Use the Select Application combo box to navigate to the helloworld application. You should see an application map that corresponds to the helloworld application recipe.
• Each service has a real-time status and shows the number of actual service instances. Click one of the services in the application map.

In the lower pane, you can navigate between several views:

• Metrics view—Displays the service metrics configured in the UI configuration section of the recipe
• Infrastructure view—Lists the virtual hosts on which your application services are deployed.
• Services view—Displays the individual service instances and correlates their various metrics.

Step 5 – Uninstall the Application

To uninstall the application, at the Cloudify shell prompt, type: uninstall-application helloworld

Step 6 – Teardown the Local Cloud

To shut down the local cloud installation, at the Cloudify shell prompt, type: teardown-localcloud.

What’s Next?

• Learn more about recipe development.
• Learn more about cloud portability and cloud drivers.
• Learn how to develop a monitoring plugin.
• Learn more about monitoring your application with the Cloudify Web Management Console.