I’ve been having fun playing with
the amazon EC2 cloud service. I set up a server running TeamCity, and an image of a server that just runs a TeamCity agent. I also setup TeamCity to automatically instantiate agents on EC2 and shut them down based upon availability of free agents. Here’s how I did it:
The first step was setting up
the teamcity server. Create an account on amazon EC2 (BTW, amazon’s sites works better in IE than it does in chrome.. who knew!?) Open
the EC2 dashboard, and click “Launch Instance” . From
the “Quick Start” tab I selected from
the list: “Getting Started on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (AMI Id: ami-c5e40dac)” . it’s good enough to just run teamcity. In
the instance details, I used
the default (Small instance, 1.7 GB mem). You might want to choose a close availability zone based on where you are. We want to “Launch instances” so click continue. Select
the default kernel, RAM disk and all. No need to enable monitoring for now (you can do that later). click continue. If you don’t have a key pair, you will be prompted to create one. Once you do, select it in
the list. Now you’ll be prompted to create a security
group. I named mine “TC” as in “TeamCity”. each
group is a bunch of settings on which ports can be let through into and out of a hosted machine. keep it as
the default settings. We will change them later. Click continue, review and then click “Launch”. Now you’ll be able to see
the new instance in
the running instances list on your site. Now, you need to install stuff on that instance (TeamCity!) . To do that, you’ll need to Remote desktop into that instance. To do that, we’ll get
the admin password for that instance: Check it on
the list, and click “Instance Actions” - “Get Windows Admin Password”. You might have to wait about 10 minutes or so for
the password to be generated for you. Once you have
the password, you will remote desktop (start-run-‘mstsc’) into
the instance. It’s address is a dns address shown below
the list under “Public DNS”. it looks something like: ec2-256-226-194-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com Once you’re inside
the instance – you’ll need to open IE (it is in hardened mode so you’ll have to relax its security settings to download stuff). I first downloaded chrome and using chrome I downloaded TeamCity. Note that
the download speed is FAST. several MBs per second. To be able to see TeamCity from
the outside, you will need to open
the advanced firewall settings inside
the remote machine, and add incoming and outgoing rules for port 80 (HTTP). Once you do that, you should be able to see
the machine from
the outside. If you still can’t, see
the next step. I also enabled ports 9090 since I will use this machine to create an agent image later as well. Now configure
the security
group (TC) to enable talking to agents: IN
the EC2 dashboard click on “Security Groups” and select your
group. To add a rule, click on
the empty list under
the ‘protocol’ header. select TCP. from and ‘to’ ports are 9090. source ip is 0.0.0.0/0 (every ip is allowed). click “Save. Also make sure you can see “HTTP” tcp 80 in that list. if you can’t see it, add it or you won’t be able to browse to
the machine’s teamcity server home page. I also set an elastic IP for
the machine: so I always have
the same IP for
the machine instance. Allocate and set one through the”Elastic IP” link on
the EC2 dashboard. you should now have a working instance of teamcity. Now let’s create an agent image. Repeat steps 1-9, but this time, make sure you select a machine that fits what an agent might do. I selected Instance type – Hihg-CPU medium machine, that is much faster. On that machine, I installed what I needed (VS 2010, PostSharp etc..). downloading VS 2010 from MSDN (2 GB took less than 10 min!) Now, instead of installing teamcity, browse using
the browser to
the teamcity homepage (from within
the remote machine). go to
the Administration page, and click
the upper right link “Install agents”. Install
the agent on he local machine – set it to
the IP or DNS of
the running TeamCity server. That way you’ll be able to check their connectivity live before making this machine your official agent image to reuse. Once
the agent is installed, see that
the TC server can see it and use it. see steps 13-14 above if they can’t. Once it works, you can take steps to make this image your agent image to be reused. next, here is a copy-paste of several steps to take from http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD5/Setting+Up+TeamCity+for+Amazon+EC2 Configure system so that agent it is started on machine boot (and make sure TeamCity server is accessible on machine boot). Test
the setup by rebooting machine and checking that
the agent connects normally to
the server. Prepare
the Image for bundling: Remove any temporary/history information in
the system. Stop
the agent (under Windows stop
the service but leave it in Automatic startup type) Delete content agent logs and temp directories (not necessary) Delete "<Agent Home>/conf/amazon-*" file (not necessary) Change config/buildAgent.properties to remove properties: name, serverAddress, authToken (not necessary) Now, we need to: Make AMI from
the running instance. Configure TeamCity EC2 support on TeamCity server. Making an AMI: Check
the instance of
the agent in
the EC2 dashboard instance list, and select instance actions->Create Image (EBS AMI) you’ll see
the image pending in
the APIs list in
the EC2 dashboard. this could take 30 minutes or more. meanwhile we can configure
the could support in
the teamcity server. COPY
THE AMI ID to
the clipboard (looks like ami-a88aa4ce) Configuring TeamCity for Cloud: In TeamCity, click on “Agents” and then on “Cloud” tab. this is where you will control your cloud agents. to configure new cloud agents based on APIs, click on
the right link to
the “configuration page” Create a new profile and select AMazon EC2 as cloud type. Use your AMI ID that you copied to
the clipboard into
the “Images” field. Select an availability zone that is
the same as
the one your instance is running on for best communication perf between them make sure you select
the ‘TC’ security
group hopefully, that should be it, and teamcity will try to instantiate new instances on demand. Note that it may take around 10 minutes for an agent to become available to teamcity from
the time it’s started.
