Packer: Support creation of elastic ip address for AWS non-default VPCs

[anthcourtney]

At present when I try to use the amazon-ebs builder for a non-default VPC, the instance is provisioned with a private ip address which packer cannot ssh into (as there is no route to the private ipaddress from the host where packer is being invoked).

2013/10/31 13:50:54 ui: ==> amazon-ebs: Launching a source AWS instance...
2013/10/31 13:50:58 /home/anth/packer/packer-builder-amazon-ebs: 2013/10/31 13:50:58 instance id: i-404e780c
==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for instance (i-404e780c) to become ready...
2013/10/31 13:50:58 ui: ==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for instance (i-404e780c) to become ready...
2013/10/31 13:50:58 /home/anth/packer/packer-builder-amazon-ebs: 2013/10/31 13:50:58 Waiting for state to become: running
    amazon-ebs: Private IP: 192.168.167.142
2013/10/31 13:51:15 ui:     amazon-ebs: Private IP: 192.168.167.142
2013/10/31 13:51:26 /home/anth/packer/packer-builder-amazon-ebs: 2013/10/31 13:51:26 Waiting for SSH, up to timeout: 1m0s
==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for SSH to become available...
2013/10/31 13:51:26 ui: ==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for SSH to become available...
2013/10/31 13:51:32 /home/anth/packer/packer-builder-amazon-ebs: 2013/10/31 13:51:32 Opening conn for SSH to tcp 192.168.167.142:22

This results in failure every time.

Can an option be added which is similar to the aws.elastic_ip option within vagrant so that an elastic ip address is allocated to the new instance?

https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/issues/18

cheers,
Anth

[mitchellh]

I think this is a decent request, so I've added a tag for it.

However, when building in a VPC, you should probably be connected to a VPN or through a bastion or something to avoid this issue.

[haf]

+1 on this

[CpuID]

This goes for Instance Store and EBS Instances.

The IP doesnt need to be an Elastic IP either, there is a flag to just assign a regular Instance Public IP in the AWS API also :)

+1 on this feature, would be extremely handy (just hit it myself).

[CpuID]

Bastion host within the VPC would be a workaround here, there are scenarios where you want to run with a non-default VPC though without VPN back to another office (unique IP space internally etc).

Plus VPN from a laptop isn't available natively, would need to use something like http://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/AwsVpc on an EC2 instance within the VPC to workaround it (in that case your basically creating another form of bastion host, just with a different network protocol in between really).

[CpuID]

Looking into this. I see the first requirement being augmenting the goamz file ec2/ec2.go to add the API flag:

NetworkInterface.n.AssociatePublicIpAddress

As per http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/ApiReference-query-RunInstances.html

Then once this is exposed, we can set it via packer.

Sound logical?

[CpuID]

OK I have this working now locally, I'll submit pull requests for goamz and packer shortly.

Note, this only adds support for AssociatePublicIpAddress, not Elastic IPs.

[CpuID]

PR22 for goamz and PR660 above are good to go - please review @mitchellh :)

[CpuID]

Note - Elastic IP Support has been added to goamz separately in https://github.com/mitchellh/goamz/pull/23 also (thanks @sorohan)

[mitchellh]

Packer supports the associate_public_ip_address option which should fix this now.

[pkaramol]

Does this mean elastic or just public IP?

[rickard-von-essen]

It means (nat'ed) public IP, not EIP. If you need EIP use a user-script that attaches it and set ssh_host to the IP.

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