Apache Libcloud Documentation

Apache Libcloud provides a unified API to manage various cloud resources across different providers. The managed resources are categorized into the following services:

• Cloud Servers and Block Storage: e.g., Amazon EC2, Rackspace CloudServers.
• Cloud Object Storage and CDN: e.g., Amazon S3, Rackspace CloudFiles.
• Load Balancers as a Service: e.g., Amazon Elastic Load Balancer.
• DNS as a Service: e.g., Amazon Route 53, Zerigo.
• Container Services: e.g., Docker, Rkt, and other container-based services.
• Backup as a Service: e.g., Amazon EBS, OpenStack Freezer.

AuroraDNS provides full support for IPv6, including:

• DNS queries over IPv6
• AAAA records
• Health checks over IPv6

The Azure driver integrates with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines using the Azure Service Management (ASM) API.

Important Compatibility Note: This is the "Classic" API. It is incompatible with the newer Azure Resource Management (ARM) API. If you need to use the ARM API, use the azure_arm driver instead.

The Container API (available in Libcloud 1.0.0-pre1 and higher) allows users to install and deploy containers onto container-based virtualization platforms. It targets both on-premise software (like Docker) and Cloud Service Providers offering Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) APIs.

Note: The Container API is currently in an EXPERIMENTAL state.

Libcloud provides a unified base API that acts as a 'lowest common denominator' across different cloud providers. To access functionality that is unique to a specific provider and not part of the standard Libcloud API, use extension methods and extension arguments. These are identified by the ex_ prefix.

Warning: Using extension methods makes your code harder to switch between different cloud providers, as these methods are not part of the common interface.

If a driver implements the class-level attribute supports_clusters = True, it enables cluster-level management. This allows users to list, create, and destroy clusters, and specify a target cluster when deploying containers.

Key abstractions for cluster support include:

• ContainerCluster: Represents a deployed container environment/host.
• ClusterLocation: Represents a location where clusters can be deployed.

Due to limitations in the Google Storage API v1.0, metadata/tags are not returned when listing objects.

• To get metadata/tags, you must use the get_object method.
• The list_container_objects method will not return metadata/tags.

The Load Balancer API uses three primary abstractions to manage load balancing services:

• LoadBalancer: Represents a specific load balancer instance.
• Member: Represents a member (e.g., a backend server or node) within a load balancer.
• Algorithm: Represents the load balancing algorithm used to distribute traffic (such as round-robin, random, or least connections).

Libcloud (version 0.14.0 and above) provides base API methods in libcloud.compute.base.NodeDriver to manage SSH key pairs on your cloud account. Supported operations include:

• List key pairs: list_key_pairs()
• Retrieve key pair info: get_key_pair(name) (returns fingerprint and public key)
• Create a new key pair: create_key_pair(name)
• Import a key pair: import_key_pair_from_string(name, key_string) or import_key_pair_from_file(name, file_path)
• Delete a key pair: delete_key_pair(name)

When using proxies with Libcloud, be aware of the following:

• Authentication: Only HTTP basic access authentication proxy authorization method is supported.
• HTTPS Verification: Using an HTTPS proxy requires manual configuration of the CA cert bundle to avoid SSLError.

In addition to the standard libcloud load balancer methods (creating balancers, adding members, and destroying members), the Dimension Data driver provides several non-standard extension methods to access provider-specific functionality:

• list nodes: Retrieve available nodes.
• list pools: Retrieve available pools.
• set the network domain (zone): Configure the network domain/zone for the load balancer.