Instructions for Sharing Clusters

By Riccardo Murri

Sharing access to a cluster

These instructions apply if you want to give other people access to an existing cluster. The person who sets up the cluster retains control of the cluster: only this person can resize the cluster or stop/destroy it.

  1. Collect SSH public keys from all the people you want to give access to. On MacOSX and Linux, SSH public keys are (usually) stored in a file ending in .pub within the .ssh directory.

Note: SSH public key files should be text file consinting of a single line, which must begin with the characters ssh-. Invalid SSH public key files can lock anyone of the cluster!

  1. Use elasticluster sftp to upload all the SSH public key files to the cluster front-end. Each SSH public key should be stored in a separate file.

  2. Log in to the cluster, then run the following command for every SSH public key file (replace key.pub with the actual path to the SSH public key file)::

cat key.pub | tee -a $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys

The above command will give another user access to the account you are logging into on the cluster; you can apply the same procedure to other accounts if you are running a multi-user cluster.

Sharing control of a cluster

These instructions apply if you want to give other people control over the cluster setup: those people will be able to resize, reconfigure, or stop/destroy the cluster. Sharing control of a cluster is a more complicated and error-prone procedure than sharing access to a cluster.

Note: Cluster control is separate from cluster access: this set of instructions will allow other people to resize a cluster or destroy/stop it – but they will not give them the ability to log in to the cluster via SSH. Follow the instructions in the previous section to grant SSH access to the cluster to other people.

  1. All people wanting to share control of a cluster must already share access to the same project / tenant / zone of the cloud where the cluster is running.

  2. All people wanting to share control of the cluster must share the [cluster/...] section of the configuration file that was used as a cluster template, and the [cloud/...], [login/...], and [setup/...] sections referred to therein. The easiest way to share such configuration information is to move all these information into a separate .conf file and copy it into your ~/.elasticluster/config.d/ directory.

  3. The person who created the cluster can now run this command to copy the cluster state information into a .zip file::

elasticluster export -o /path/to/export/file.zip

  1. Distribute the .zip file to other people who need to control the cluster; they should copy it on the machines where they want to run the elasticluster command.

  2. Each person wanting to have control of the cluster size and lifecycle can now run this command to import the cluster state::

elasticluster import /path/to/copied/export/file.zip
  1. Everyone should now be able to see the cluster listed in the output of elasticluster list.

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