Caution
This page documents the latest, unreleased version of Buildbot. For documentation for released versions, see https://docs.buildbot.net/current/.
Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (“AWS EC2”)
- class buildbot.worker.ec2.EC2LatentWorker
EC2 is a web service that allows you to start virtual machines in an Amazon data center. Please see their website for details, including costs. Using the AWS EC2 latent workers involves getting an EC2 account with AWS and setting up payment; customizing one or more EC2 machine images (“AMIs”) on your desired operating system(s) and publishing them (privately if needed); and configuring the buildbot master to know how to start your customized images for “substantiating” your latent workers.
This document will guide you through setup of a AWS EC2 latent worker:
Get an AWS EC2 Account
To start off, to use the AWS EC2 latent worker, you need to get an AWS developer account and sign up for EC2. Although Amazon often changes this process, these instructions should help you get started:
Go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and click to “Sign Up Now” for an AWS account.
Once you are logged into your account, you need to sign up for EC2. Instructions for how to do this have changed over time because Amazon changes their website, so the best advice is to hunt for it. After signing up for EC2, it may say it wants you to upload an x.509 cert. You will need this to create images (see below) but it is not technically necessary for the buildbot master configuration.
You must enter a valid credit card before you will be able to use EC2. Do that under ‘Payment Method’.
Make sure you’re signed up for EC2 by going to and verifying EC2 is listed.
Create an AMI
Now you need to create an AMI and configure the master. You may need to run through this cycle a few times to get it working, but these instructions should get you started.
Creating an AMI is out of the scope of this document. The EC2 Getting Started Guide is a good resource for this task. Here are a few additional hints.
When an instance of the image starts, it needs to automatically start a buildbot worker that connects to your master (to create a buildbot worker, Creating a worker; to make a daemon, Launching the daemons).
You may want to make an instance of the buildbot worker, configure it as a standard worker in the master (i.e., not as a latent worker), and test and debug it that way before you turn it into an AMI and convert to a latent worker in the master.
In order to avoid extra costs in case of master failure, you should configure the worker of the AMI with
maxretriesoption (see Worker Options) Also see example systemd unit file example
Configure the Master with an EC2LatentWorker
Now let’s assume you have an AMI that should work with the EC2LatentWorker.
It’s now time to set up your buildbot master configuration.
You will need some information from your AWS account: the Access Key Id and the Secret Access Key. If you’ve built the AMI yourself, you probably already are familiar with these values. If you have not, and someone has given you access to an AMI, these hints may help you find the necessary values:
While logged into your AWS account, find the “Access Identifiers” link (either on the left, or via .
On the page, you’ll see alphanumeric values for “Your Access Key Id:” and “Your Secret Access Key:”. Make a note of these. Later on, we’ll call the first one your
identifierand the second one yoursecret_identifier.
When creating an EC2LatentWorker in the buildbot master configuration, the first three arguments are required.
The name and password are the first two arguments, and work the same as with normal workers.
The next argument specifies the type of the EC2 virtual machine (available options as of this writing include m1.small, m1.large, m1.xlarge, c1.medium, and c1.xlarge; see the EC2 documentation for descriptions of these machines).
Here is the simplest example of configuring an EC2 latent worker. It specifies all necessary remaining values explicitly in the instantiation.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey'
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
]
The ami argument specifies the AMI that the master should start.
The identifier argument specifies the AWS Access Key Id, and the secret_identifier specifies the AWS Secret Access Key.
Both the AMI and the account information can be specified in alternate ways.
Note
Whoever has your identifier and secret_identifier values can request AWS work charged to your account, so these values need to be carefully protected.
Another way to specify these access keys is to put them in a separate file.
Buildbot supports the standard AWS credentials file.
You can then make the access privileges stricter for this separate file, and potentially let more people read your main configuration file.
If your master is running in EC2, you can also use IAM roles for EC2 to delegate permissions.
keypair_name and security_name allow you to specify different names for these AWS EC2 values.
You can make an .aws directory in the home folder of the user running the buildbot master.
In that directory, create a file called credentials.
The format of the file should be as follows, replacing identifier and secret_identifier with the credentials obtained before.
[default]
aws_access_key_id = identifier
aws_secret_access_key = secret_identifier
If you are using IAM roles, no config file is required. Then you can instantiate the worker as follows.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
]
Previous examples used a particular AMI. If the Buildbot master will be deployed in a process-controlled environment, it may be convenient to specify the AMI more flexibly. Rather than specifying an individual AMI, specify one or two AMI filters.
In all cases, the AMI that sorts last by its location (the S3 bucket and manifest name) will be preferred.
One available filter is to specify the acceptable AMI owners, by AWS account number (the 12 digit number, usually rendered in AWS with hyphens like “1234-5678-9012”, should be entered as in integer).
from buildbot.plugins import worker
bot1 = worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
valid_ami_owners=[11111111111,
22222222222],
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
The other available filter is to provide a regular expression string that will be matched against each AMI’s location (the S3 bucket and manifest name).
from buildbot.plugins import worker
bot1 = worker.EC2LatentWorker(
'bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
valid_ami_location_regex=r'buildbot\-.*/image.manifest.xml',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
The regular expression can specify a group, which will be preferred for the sorting. Only the first group is used; subsequent groups are ignored.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
bot1 = worker.EC2LatentWorker(
'bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
valid_ami_location_regex=r'buildbot\-.*\-(.*)/image.manifest.xml',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
If the group can be cast to an integer, it will be. This allows 10 to sort after 1, for instance.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
bot1 = worker.EC2LatentWorker(
'bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
valid_ami_location_regex=r'buildbot\-.*\-(\d+)/image.manifest.xml',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
In addition to using the password as a handshake between the master and the worker, you may want to use a firewall to assert that only machines from a specific IP can connect as workers.
This is possible with AWS EC2 by using the Elastic IP feature.
To configure, generate a Elastic IP in AWS, and then specify it in your configuration using the elastic_ip argument.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
'ami-12345',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
elastic_ip='208.77.188.166',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
)
]
One other way to configure a worker is by settings AWS tags.
They can for example be used to have a more restrictive security IAM policy.
To get Buildbot to tag the latent worker specify the tag keys and values in your configuration using the tags argument.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
'ami-12345',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
tags={'SomeTag': 'foo'})
]
If the worker needs access to additional AWS resources, you can also enable your workers to access them via an EC2 instance profile. To use this capability, you must first create an instance profile separately in AWS. Then specify its name on EC2LatentWorker via instance_profile_name.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
instance_profile_name='my_profile'
)
]
You may also supply your own boto3.Session object to allow for more flexible session options (ex. cross-account)
To use this capability, you must first create a boto3.Session object.
Then provide it to EC2LatentWorker via session argument.
import boto3
from buildbot.plugins import worker
session = boto3.session.Session()
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
session=session
)
]
The EC2LatentWorker supports all other configuration from the standard Worker.
The missing_timeout and notify_on_missing specify how long to wait for an EC2 instance to attach before considering the attempt to have failed, and email addresses to alert, respectively.
missing_timeout defaults to 20 minutes.
Volumes
If you want to attach existing volumes to an ec2 latent worker, use the volumes attribute.
This mechanism can be valuable if you want to maintain state on a conceptual worker across multiple start/terminate sequences.
volumes expects a list of (volume_id, mount_point) tuples to attempt attaching when your instance has been created.
If you want to attach new ephemeral volumes, use the block_device_map attribute. This follows the AWS API syntax, essentially acting as a passthrough. The only distinction is that the volumes default to deleting on termination to avoid leaking volume resources when workers are terminated. See boto documentation for further details.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
block_device_map= [
{
"DeviceName": "/dev/xvdb",
"Ebs" : {
"VolumeType": "io1",
"Iops": 1000,
"VolumeSize": 100
}
}
]
)
]
VPC Support
If you are managing workers within a VPC, your worker configuration must be modified from above. You must specify the id of the subnet where you want your worker placed. You must also specify security groups created within your VPC as opposed to classic EC2 security groups. This can be done by passing the ids of the vpc security groups. Note, when using a VPC, you can not specify classic EC2 security groups (as specified by security_name).
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
ami='ami-12345',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
subnet_id='subnet-12345',
security_group_ids=['sg-12345','sg-67890']
)
]
Spot instances
If you would prefer to use spot instances for running your builds, you can accomplish that by passing in a True value to the spot_instance parameter to the EC2LatentWorker constructor.
Additionally, you may want to specify max_spot_price and price_multiplier in order to limit your builds’ budget consumption.
from buildbot.plugins import worker
c['workers'] = [
worker.EC2LatentWorker('bot1', 'sekrit', 'm1.large',
'ami-12345', region='us-west-2',
identifier='publickey',
secret_identifier='privatekey',
elastic_ip='208.77.188.166',
keypair_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
security_name='latent_buildbot_worker',
placement='b', spot_instance=True,
max_spot_price=0.09,
price_multiplier=1.15,
product_description='Linux/UNIX')
]
This example would attempt to create a m1.large spot instance in the us-west-2b region costing no more than $0.09/hour.
The spot prices for ‘Linux/UNIX’ spot instances in that region over the last 24 hours will be averaged and multiplied by the price_multiplier parameter, then a spot request will be sent to Amazon with the above details.
If the multiple exceeds the max_spot_price, the bid price will be the max_spot_price.
Either max_spot_price or price_multiplier, but not both, may be None.
If price_multiplier is None, then no historical price information is retrieved; the bid price is simply the specified max_spot_price.
If the max_spot_price is None, then the multiple of the historical average spot prices is used as the bid price with no limit.