Nucleator allows you to easily create and manage secure, scalable environments in Amazon Web Services (AWS), into which reusable stacks of components can be deployed to address common cloud usage scenarios, for example:
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Establishing a continuous integration framework with the desired deployment environments, deployment targets, and required security, high-availability and scaling characteristics
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Highly available and scalable application configurations
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On-demand EMR or Redshift cluster deployments
Nucleator makes it easy to partition your environments across multiple AWS accounts and to leverage a supported and maintained set of CloudFormation stacks that work together to allow you to focus on your core problems.
Instant AWS Productivity
Reduces bootstrapping time for new customers with new AWS Accounts to productive usage.
More than Infrastructure as Code - Operations as Code
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High-level operational building blocks required to quickly realize cloud workloads in response to business needs
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Provides key operational / SOP interfaces that lower level CM tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, OpsWorks) leave unaddressed on their own
Embedded, Reviewed Best Practices Usage
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Security
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High Availability
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Scalability
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Resource tagging and cost Reporting
Strong Cross-Account Support
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Partition Disparate workloads into distinct VPCs and/ or AWS Accounts
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Provision and configure cages and Stacksets seamlessly across multiple accounts
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Use of IAM Roles to enable cross-account processes without sharing IAM credentials
Rich Contribution Model enables Collaboration / Sharing of Workloads and Operational Building Blocks
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Publishers of Nucleator Stacksets provide everything that is needed for collaborators to easily replicate and extend their infrastructure and process
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Libraries of Stacksets allow users to quickly get started with diverse workloads.
Improved Account Governance and Resource Accountability
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Allocation of nearly all AWS Resources to Stacksets with corresponding CloudFormation Stacks makes it clear what resources exist to support which processes
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Provides a strong accountability model and means for organizing Resources within each AWS Account
Nucleator defines the following key concepts to allow you to create scalable, secure and redundant AWS architectures.
Customer
Nucleator can support multiple Customers in each Nucleator config. In a simple Nucleator installation, there may only be a single Customer, for your company. When using Nucleator to support managed services engagements, there may be a Customer for your company, and multiple additional Customers for your company's customers, or for your customer's customers.
In Nucleator, each Customer has a corresponding DNS domain (e.g. 47lining.com), through which that customer's resources can be accessed.
Nucleator can manage one or more AWS Accounts per Customer. Each Customer must specify at least one AWS Account.
Cage
A Cage is a distinct VPC, provisioned on behalf of a single customer, within which additional infrastructure can be deployed. A Cage in Nucleator is similar to a Cage in physical data center.
In Nucleator, each Cage is named based on its purpose, and is resolved via DNS as a subdomain of the Cage's Customer's DNS domain (e.g. build.47lining.com).
Each Cage is provisioned within exactly one of the Cage's Customer's AWS Accounts. The configuration for the Cage specifies the AWS Account in which the Cage should be provisioned.
One or more Stacksets can be provisioned within each Cage.
AWS Account
Nucleator can manage AWS infrastructure that is deployed across one or more AWS Accounts for each Customer. Allocation of infrastructure to AWS Accounts is managed at the granularity of a Cage. Each Cage is provisioned in exactly one AWS Account. Any Stacksets provisioned within that Cage will be provisioned within the same AWS Account as the Cage.
Stackset
A Stackset is a defined set of AWS CloudFormation Stacks whose creation, updates and deletes are orchestrated by Nucleator. For example, the "builder" Stackset, provisioned within the build Cage provides deployment environment creation and continuous integration services accessible via ansible.build.47lining.com, nucleator-ui.build.47lining.com and artifactory.build.47lining.com.
Deployment Environment
Some Cages act as Deployment Environments for applications within a continuous integration and release process. Nucleator includes out-of-the-box support for many common continuous integration & continuous deployment use cases. Nucleator also includes support for several common types of Deployment Targets, and underlying infrastructure services and deployment patterns that support the interactions among loosely coupled applications within a Deployment Environment.
Deployment Target
A Deployment Target is a provisioned set of services within a Deployment Environment that is capable of accepting Deployment Artifacts for a specific version of a specific application.
Deployment Targets are typed, and correspond to the type of Deployment Artifact and infrastructure services that are required to support them.
Each Deployment Environment can include multiple Deployment Targets as required to support the Customer's needs.
Nucleator includes out-of-the-box support for many common types of Deployment Targets (e.g. Java applications served by Tomcat, Python applications, ...)
You will need to have Git, Python 2.7.x and pip installed on your machine to install Nucleator.
Nucleator currently requires a modified version of Ansible. The modifications have been submitted to the core Ansible project but have not yet made it into the core Ansible repository.
To install the required Ansible version:
git clone --recursive --depth 1 -b nucleator_distribution https://github.com/47lining/ansible.git; cd ansible; sudo python setup.py install
Now install the core Nucleator package:
pip install --upgrade https://github.com/47lining/nucleator-core.git
See the Nucleator Users Guide for detailed instructions on using Nucleator.