Blimpy YAY

_posts/2012-05-21-introducing-blimpy.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Introducing Blimpy, a cloud thing
+tags:
+- blimpy
+- puppet
+- devops
+---
+
+
+**DEATH TO VIRTUALBOX**
+
+---
+
+Phew, okay. With that out of the way, let me tell you about
+[Blimpy](https://github.com/rtyler/blimpy#readme); a tool that I have written
+to make working with "cloud" machines easy as pie.
+
+<img src="http://strongspace.com/rtyler/public/excelsior.png" align="right"
+title="Uh, hello? Airplanes? It's Blimps, you win."/>
+
+As much as I love my Thinkpad, it's not really suited to heavy virtualization.
+Despite having a delightful 8GB handy, it still only has a couple of teeny tiny
+CPU cores. What it *does* have though, is a nice internet connection to the
+CLOUD.
+
+Blimpy was built to help me take advantage of the plethora of machines that can
+be spun up on [AWS](http://aws.amazon.com) and other public cloud providers.
+
+My immediate usecase for Blimpy is that I've needed to spin up a machines
+rapidly to perform end-to-end testing of
+[Puppet](http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-open-source/) modules such as
+[puppet-jenkins](https://github.com/rtyler/puppet-jenkins)
+
+
+Below is a screencast of using Blimpy to validate the module:
+
+<center><iframe width="640" height="480"
+src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ub8V_TbYEE8?rel=0" frameborder="0"
+allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
+
+This was done with a simple Blimpfile:
+
+     Blimpy.fleet do |fleet|
+       fleet.add(:aws) do |ship|
+         ship.name = 'puppet-jenkins'
+         ship.ports = [22, 8080]
+         ship.livery = :cwd
+         ship.flavor = 'm1.large'
+       end
+     end
+
+Blimpy is structured to make it easy to spin up multiple machines at once, in
+this case however I'm only going to spin up a single machine (defaulted to
+Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit in US West 2), of the "m1.large" flavor. Jenkins is a
+hungry application, so I'm not going to use the default "t1.micro" flavor.
+
+The `Blimpfile` also specifies that port 8080 should be opened, and will create
+a special Blimpy security group in AWS that properly allows ports 22 and 8080
+through.
+
+
+The project is still fairly young, but reasonably well tested (in my opinion)
+Ruby code, all of which can [be found on
+GitHub](https://github.com/rtyler/blimpy#readme)