Getting Started: AWS

This guide is a walkthrough for deploying a BOSH director with bbl on AWS. Upon completion, you will have the following:

  1. A BOSH director
  2. A jumpbox
  3. A set of randomly generated BOSH director credentials
  4. A generated keypair allowing you to SSH into the BOSH director and any instances BOSH deploys
  5. A copy of the manifest the BOSH director was deployed with
  6. A basic cloud config

Creating an IAM user

In order for bbl to interact with AWS, an IAM user must be created.

This user will be issuing API requests to create the infrastructure such as EC2 instances, load balancers, subnets, etc.

The user must have the following policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:*",
                "elasticloadbalancing:*",
                "cloudformation:*",
                "iam:*",
                "kms:*",
                "route53:*",
                "ec2:*"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

To create a user and associated policy with the AWS CLI run the following commands (policy text must be in your clipboard):

$ aws iam create-user --user-name "bbl-user"
$ aws iam put-user-policy --user-name "bbl-user" \
    --policy-name "bbl-policy" \
    --policy-document "$(pbpaste)"
$ aws iam create-access-key --user-name "bbl-user"

The create-access-key command will write an "access key id" and "secret access key" to the terminal. These values are important and should be kept secret. In the next section bbl will use these commands to create infrastructure on AWS.

Pave Infrastructure, Create a Jumpbox, and Create a BOSH Director

bbl will create infrastructure and deploy a BOSH director with the following command:

bbl up \
    --aws-access-key-id <INSERT ACCESS KEY ID> \
    --aws-secret-access-key <INSERT SECRET ACCESS KEY> \
    --aws-region us-west-1 \
    --iaas aws

The process takes around 5-8 minutes.

The bbl state directory contains all of the files that were used to create your bosh director. This should be checked in to version control, so that you have all the information necessary to later destroy or update this environment at a later date.

Next Steps