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The cloud consists of two geographically distinct regions, hosted in Calgary and Edmonton. The high speed research and education network links the two regions through a 10Gbps connection providing excellent network performance and low latency. Upon registration, users are allocated a quota of 8 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 500GB of storage space, along with 1 public IPv4 address and an IPv6 address for each instance.

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1. Create account

2. Create a key pair

3. Modify the default security group

4. Launch an instance

5. Allocate and associate a floating IPRequesting, Allocating and associating floating IPs

6. Log in

7. Create a volume

8. Attach a volume

9. Use a volume

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Cybera has confirmed that most Telus, some users who use TELUS or Shaw, University of Alberta users (via WiFi), and Concordia users have IPv6 connectivity. If you fall into one of these groups, please use the above links to verify and if at all possible, we ask that you use IPv6 to connect to your instance in order to help us conserve IPv4 addresses.

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If you’re more curious about IPv6 itself we recommend reading the Wikipedia article on IPv6.

Public IPv4 addressing 

Each Rapid Access Cloud account and its associated project is allotted one public IPv4 address. accounts are able to also have public IPv4 addresses allocated to them, however due to demand the default quota is 0. This is referred to as a floating-ip in OpenStack and can be associated with only one instance at a time.

This limitation on IP address availability can be overcome, and in fact can make for a more robust and secure cloud environment in some cases. Please see the Making the most of a single IPv4 Address section for solutions to this problem. 

Allocate and associate a floating IP

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Requesting, Allocating and associating floating IPs

By default a new Rapid Access Cloud account does not have a quota permitting a public IPv4 address.

To request a floating IP address you can fill out a form on the dashboard by:

1. Log-in to the Rapid Access Cloud dashboard at https://cloud.cybera.ca.

2. In the left-hand panel under “RAC”, click “Quota Change".

3. Request one floating IP and fill out the reason and then press "Submit a Quota Change Request"

rac-admin will be notified and we will process your quota change request as soon as possible.

Allocating a floating IP address

If your project does have have quota for a floating IP, the floating IP is not allocated to your automatically. You will need to allocate a floating IP to your While each project by default is permitted up to one public IPv4 address (or floating-ip), it is not allocated automatically; you must specifically allocate one manually to a project. Given the scarcity of the addresses for Cybera (and indeed, the world), addresses allocated to projects that have gone unused for three months will be reclaimed, however you are welcome to allocate an IP address again if needed.

1. Log-in to the Rapid Access Cloud dashboard at https://cloud.cybera.ca.

2. In the left-hand panel under “Compute”, click “Instances”.

3. Click the Action drop-down button on the right-hand side and select “Associate Floating IP”.

4. Click on the “+” sign next to “Select an IP address”.

5. There is only one pool of addresses available (nova) and the quota shows only one IP address from that pool, so simply click “Allocate IP”.

6. After the IP address has been allocated, click the “Associate” button the the right hand side. Under the Instances summary, your Instance should now have three IP addresses, including a publicly accessible IPv4 address.

Associating the floating

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IP address to other instances 

Given the ease of creating and destroying instances, along with the possibilities of changing needs, moving the IPv4 address around may be required. Once the address is allocated to a project, it can be assigned to any instance associated with the project. When an instance is destroyed, the associated IP address remains allocated to the project. Simply follow the steps above to associate the IP address with a new instance, omitting the steps for allocating the address (steps 4 and 5).

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As mentioned in the Accessing Instances section, connecting to an instance via IPv6 is preferred over using a Floating IP. Please see the links above to determine if you have IPv6 connectivity (Telus and University of Alberta users are known to have IPv6 connectivity)IP. If you do have IPv6 connectivity, replace "floating_ip_address" with your instance's IPv6 address a floating IP address associated with your instance you can use your floating IP instead of the IPv6 address or use the DNS name autogenerated as seen in the instructions below.

To  To make IPv6 addresses more friendly, instances are also given an automated DNS name that maps to your IPv6 address and if applicable your floating IP address. The autogenerated domain can be found on your instance's details page under the Metadata section. (eg. 12345.yyc.cybera.ca)

From Linux, UNIX, or BSD (including OS X)

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1. Open a terminal and enter: 

   Code Block
   $ ssh -i /path/to/<key_pair_name>.pem ubuntu@<floating_ip_address>ubuntu@<ipv6_address_or_dns_name>

   
   

2. Answer ‘yes’ to the following question: 

   Code Block
   The authenticity of host '<floating<ipv6_ip_address> (<floating_ip<ipv6_address>)' can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is e5:de:ad:c3:be:ef:b2:ba:be:a1:ba:dc:af:ea:ce:d4. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

   
   

3. You are now logged in and will then be presented with the Message Of The Day and a shell prompt: 

   Code Block

   ---------------------------- Cloud Image Helper Scripts ---------------------------- To enable automatic updates please run: /usr/local/bin/enableAutoUpdate To install the latest OpenStack tools please run: /usr/local/bin/installOpenStackTools To use the local software update proxy please run: /usr/local/bin/localSUS To remove this message from your message of the day please run: sudo rm /etc/motd ubuntu@<your_instance_name>:~$

   
   

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1. Open the main PuTTY application.

2. Enter the remote server IP address under the “Session” category in left-hand panel.

3. Navigate to the “Connection” category, then “Data”.

4. Under Login details, enter the username to log in with. For ubuntu instances on the Rapid Access Cloud, the default is ubuntu.

5. In the “Connection” category in the left-hand menu, select “SSH”  and then “Auth”.

6. Click “Browse…” under “Authentication parameters / Private key file” for authentication.

7. Locate the *.ppk private key you generated above and click “Open”.

8. Navigate back to the “Session” category to name the session and then click “Save”.

9. Click “Open” to log into the remote server with key pair authentication.
   
   

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Volumes

You now have a running instance in the cloud. This flavor we used is m1.small, and it has 20 GB of root storage. The nature of the instances are ephemeral, so any data left in an instance when it is destroyed is gone for good. It makes much more sense to create a data volume that is independent of the instance, and can be attached and reattached as needed, much like attaching a USB disk to the computer.

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