Adding a cloud to your organization

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Started with OneOps, the first thing you had to do after installing OneOps was to create an organization. Remember that the term organization is used to just logically group your resources. So, if you work for a small company, you may very well group all your resources under one organization. If, however, you work for a big company, you may decide to create one organization per department. If your company departments are also too big, you may have decided to have an organization per team inside of that department, so you can manage the allocation of team, resources, clouds, and services better. The decision is entirely up to you, and it should be planned carefully. However, after you have added your organization and arranged your team members, you will have to add a cloud and then add services to the cloud before you can start doing deployments.

Click on Clouds on the left-hand side menu, and you will be taken to the cloud addition page. If you are trying the Amazon AMI and logged in with the username oneops and password oneops, you will note a cloud named ec2-cloud, which is an excellent and descriptive name, has already been added for you to quickly get you up and running. If you click on the cloud, you will see various attributes, as well as various services added to the cloud:

If you are starting with a brand new blank installation, click on the Add Cloud button or link. This will take you to a screen, which will allow you to add a cloud. Choose a good descriptive name for your cloud, as in the preceding example, and add a good description. Then, choose the cloud location. At the time of writing this, OneOps supports AWS, Azure, Rackspace, and OpenStack (custom) clouds. Although Vagrant and Docker are listed as cloud targets, they are placeholders for future expansions and are not valid targets at the moment. If you wish to deploy one of the existing clouds, such as AWS, Azure, Rackspace, or OpenStack, it is important that you choose Location carefully as OneOps will configure a few things automatically for you:

Tip

If you define a cloud of the type Custom, you will also be asked to provide an authorization key. This authorization key will be used when you connect your services to a backend inductor.

Once you have configured a cloud, it will be an umbrella under which you will configure various services which you will use then for deployments. It is not necessary, as we will soon see, to have all the services from the same vendor, which is the beauty of OneOps. You can also configure multiple clouds and use them in a redundant fashion to deploy your software at the same time to multiple locations. Once you have added your cloud, all your clouds will show up in the clouds section, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now you are ready to add services to your cloud.