Cloutron

Cloutron is an extensible terminal UI for cloud-hackers. It allows you to attach utility views running in other terminals to monitor your AWS cloud services, displaying helpful information such as available instances, databases, load-balancers etc, while giving you teh sense that you're being busy by having lots of terminal panes open showing colourful cloudie things.

Cloutron also provides a platform on which to build your own UI views, requesting and processing data from potentially any API to suit your own requirements. Cloutron is pretty much just a terrible hack and slash of the fantastic Voltron tool from @snare. (He built an amazing tool, I raided his view / plugin / configuration functionality)

Support

cloutron is built primarily for Amazon's Web Services (AWS). But, there's no reason why it can't have views added for DigitalOcean etc.

The following cloud-platforms are supported:

	supported
aws ec2	√
aws rds	√
aws elb	√
aws autoscale	√
aws codedeploy	√

Installation

First you need to install snare's Scruffy version 0.2.1

# wget -O scruffy-0.2.1.tar.gz https://github.com/snare/scruffy/tarball/v0.2.1#egg=scruffy
# tar -zxvf scruffy-0.2.1.tar.gz
# cd snare-scruffy-3c26a5a/ (Or whatever the folder name is here)
# python setup.py install

A standard python setup script is included. And will automatically install other dependencies.

# cd cloutron-install-folder/
# python setup.py install

This will install the cloutron egg wherever that happens on your system, and an executable named cloutron to /usr/local/bin/.

Quick Start

1. Cloutron uses boto for interfacing with AWS, so refer to the boto config on how to configure your AWS credentials. We recommend creating a new IAM user with only 'describe' permissions for better security!

2. In a single terminal (or a bunch of tmux panes or iTerm panes) start the cloutron views that you want:

    $ cloutron view ec2instances
    $ cloutron view elasticloadbalancers
    $ cloutron view relationaldatabases
    $ cloutron view autoscale
    $ cloutron view codedeploy
   

3. These can be shortcutted to:

    $ cloutron v i
    $ cloutron v e
    $ cloutron v r
    $ cloutron v a
    $ cloutron v c
   

4. Runtime options can be seen by running:

    $ cloutron v i -h
   
    This allows the configuration of options such as polling frequency (defaults to 60 seconds) and AWS Region (defaults to us-east-1)
   

Bugs

See the issue tracker on github.

License

As this is mostly snare's work, his license below is still in place, and if you feel the need, also buy me a beer. The original Voltron license is here: This software is released under the "Buy snare a beer" license. If you use this and don't hate it, buy me a beer at a conference some time. This license also extends to other contributors - richo definitely deserves a few beers for his contributions.

Credits

Thanks to snare at Azimuth Security for creating Voltron, and for spending time chatting with me about it and letting me rip it to shreds.

Also, props to richo for all his contributions to Voltron.

Also thanks to Asterisk for being such a cloudy company.