tracking cloud instances

[Seth Vidal]

So - as we noodle around with cloud instances more the most obvious 
problem I have seen is getting a list of instance ids like:

i-F7AA3F96
i-77B34039
i-B1EB403D
i-2C294684

and then trying to figure out which ones are jenkins slaves, the torrent 
seed test and the fedocal instance. And which can be nuked safely or not.

I'm thinking we need a tool that would poll the cloudlet(s), retrieve all 
the basic, available, info about the running instances.



Then admins could either add metadata to any given instance id to know 
whence things come.

Data I'd be interested in having:
- who owns it - not just the account/tenant
- what it is for
- expected expiration date (if any)
- who should have access to it (usernames from fas and or group names from 
fas, ideally) - this will make keeping ssh keys on it somewhat sane
- what, if any, configuration script was run on it (eg: an ansible 
playbook)
- published urls and where they should alias from?


Now we probably also need something that keeps a list of persistent 
instances we should always restart and register them.

for example: let's say we want one instance always running as a simple 
webserver - maybe as a touchstone to verify the cloud is always working. 
So we should be able to register this instance. Say which img it should 
use, what security group, etc and note that it should ALWAYS be running. 
Then when that instance is running its instance id/public ip should be 
registered in the db listed above.

We can use the data in the db to generate aliases, perhaps.

still fleshing out these ideas.

-sv