Purpose of the Evaluation Guide

The purpose of this evaluation guide is to show the power of combining the IaaS features and functionality of the Google Compute Engine (GCE) cloud with RightScale Cloud Management to manage all of your cloud infrastructure with a single, integrated solution.

Audience

In general, readers of this evaluation guide fall into one of the following two groups:

• New Google Compute Engine users and New RightScale users
  if you are new to Google Compute Engine and new to RightScale, we recommend that you read the entire evaluation guide to gain a more complete understanding of the Google Compute Engine + RightScale solution. 
• New Google Compute Engine users but experienced RightScale users
  If you are new to Google Compute Engine but have some experience with RightScale, feel free to skip the Introduction to RightScale and Register for a RightScale Account sections. 

Introduction to RightScale

RightScale is the leading cloud management platform, supporting Google Compute Engine and a range of public and private clouds. RightScale has more than 50,000 users and has launched over 5 million servers including many of the largest production deployments and scaling events in public and private clouds.

RightScale provides complete lifecycle management for public and private cloud-based applications including provisioning, monitoring, configuration, automation, auditing, and governance. This enables efficient administration with a single view of multiple cloud accounts’ usage, resources, and role-based access controls. RightScale is a multi-cloud solution, making it easy to migrate workloads into and out of public and private clouds, with consistent governance, monitoring, and automation, and to construct hybrid and multi-data center environments for large organizations, distributed applications, and high availability. In addition, RightScale offers services including consultative support, business critical SLAs, onboarding services, and end-to-end engineering that has advised the cloud’s cutting edge deployments.

Use Cases

Sign up for Google Compute Engine

Create a Google Compute Engine Account

The first step is to sign up for Google Compute Engine. If you already have a Google Compute Engine account, you may sign in using your existing Google Compute Engine account or you can sign up here. Note that during Google's limited preview, it may take a while to get approved to participate. Contact your account manager or sales@rightscale.com for more information.

Activate Google Compute Engine

Once you've successfully created a Google Compute Engine account, the next step is to make sure the "Google Compute Engine" service is active. This service must stay active for Google Compute Engine use.

From your Google APIs Console, under "Services," request access for the "Google Compute Engine" service and make it active.

Activate Google Cloud Storage

We recommend the "Google Cloud Storage" service stay enabled for RightScale with Google Compute Engine use.

From your Google APIs Console, under "Services," make "Google Compute Engine" active.

Enable Billing

In order to use their cloud services, you must enable billing by providing valid credit card information. Under the "Billing" section, click Enable Billing and provide the required information.

Required GCE Credentials

Later, you will add the following information into the RightScale Dashboard to validate your account. RightScale requires this information to execute actions in GCE on your behalf.

Project ID

Your unique Google Project ID (e.g. rightscale.com:example) is shown in the Overview area of your GCE console. This will be used to add GCE to a RightScale account

Add Google Compute Engine to your Account

After logging into the Dashboard, go to Settings > Account Settings > Clouds tab.  Click Connect to a Cloud.

Next, click the (+) icon next to Google.

Next, enter your Google Compute Engine cloud credentials. You will need to enter your Project ID and click Continue.

After adding your Project ID, Google will request permission to allow access to RightScale.

Important! The Google username that you are signed in with to request access must match the username that's tied to the Google Project ID that you are adding to the RightScale account. Otherwise, you will be able to add Google as a cloud to the RightScale account, but it will not be usable.

Once you allow access, you will see that the Google Compute Engine cloud is enabled under the Clouds tab in the Dashboard.  You will now see all of your Google Compute Engine resources under the Clouds menu (Clouds > Google Compute Engine).

Check the cloud status

On the same Clouds tab or on the Cloud Credentials widget in the Overview tab, you may check the status of your cloud.

Both of these items must be valid and active (green) in order to successfully launch cloud servers:

Create a Deployment

Your deployment is the container for your servers. A deployment consists of a cluster or group of Servers that work together and share common Input variables and cloud configurations.

Before launching servers, you must create a deployment. To create a deployment:

1. Go to Manage > Deployments.
2. Click New and provide the following information:

• Nickname - User-defined name for the deployment.
• Description - A short, internal-only description of the deployment.

User Management

RightScale user management features allow you to control access to your Google Compute Engine cloud and add or remove users as needed. RightScale has several types of users that are defined by their roles. RightScale administrators can assign the different roles to users, depending on each user's needs. This level of control adds flexibility and lets users collaborate on projects in RightScale and in your Google Compute Engine cloud.

Accounts

Each user needs access to two types of accounts:

• RightScale Account - Create a RightScale Account to log in to the RightScale Dashboard and manage your Google Compute Engine cloud. Registration requires an email and password. To view information about your RightScale Account in the Dashboard, go to Settings > Account.
  Note: Unless otherwise specified, the word 'account' in the documentation refers to your RightScale Account.
• Google Compute Engine - Before you can use the RightScale Dashboard to manage your server instances in Google Compute Engine, make sure you have valid Google Compute Engine credentials. You need to enter valid credentials into the Dashboard in order to launch and manage resources in your Google Compute Engine cloud through the RightScale Dashboard or API. 

The following diagram shows three separate users. John set up the 'Site1.com' RightScale account and invited Ben (who has his own RightScale account) to be a user of the 'Site1.com' RightScale account. Ben set up his own RightScale account, which he's enabled to manage resources across multiple cloud providers. Greg is new to RightScale and has never set up his own RightScale account, however Ben invited him to be a user of his 'Site2.com' RightScale account. 

Keep in mind that a RightScale Account is separate from a Cloud Account. You can register multiple cloud accounts with a single RightScale account. However, you will be responsible for paying for all cloud and cloud-related cloud usage costs. If you are a paying customer of RightScale, your cloud usage costs are separate charges from your RightScale Edition subscription fee.

User

RightScale users are identified by their email address. Each user can have access to multiple RightScale Accounts. Create your own RightScale Account or accept invitations to be a user of other RightScale Accounts. To view information about your User settings across all of the RightScale accounts that you have access to, go to Settings > User. 

In the diagram below, John Doe is identified as 'john@mysite.com' in the RightScale platform. He currently has access to three RightScale Accounts and has different user role privileges in each of those accounts.

In the RightScale system, your email address is used as your username or unique identifier and is also used in audit entries, changelogs, and histories to identify which user performed a particular action(s) within a RightScale Account. Therefore, it's important that login credentials (email/password) are never shared or used by multiple users because it will not be possible to track user actions in the Dashboard.

Managing your RightScale Account

If you are an 'admin' user of a RightScale account, you can use the various user roles to control the permissions of all invited users in order to manage their level of access and functionality. Only 'admin' users can send account invitations. If you are an 'admin' user, you must specify a user's roles before sending an account invitation. Later, you can change a user's roles under the Settings > Account Settings > Users tab. 

Note: Only an 'admin' user can revoke another user's 'admin' privileges.

It's important that you never share the email/password that you use to log into the RightScale Dashboard. For example, if an account (e.g. 'Site1.com') has multiple users, each user should create a unique RightScale account. Later, the 'admin' user of the 'Site1.com' account can invite additional users to that account. This is the only way that you can have user accountability within an account. If you share the same email/password with multiple users, there is no way to determine who launched or terminated a server. It's important that each action can be attributed to a single user.

User Roles

To view your own user role privileges across all of your accounts, go to Settings > User > Info. Remember, user roles are account-specific. The following is a list of available roles and a brief description of what each role can do in the RightScale Dashboard.

admin: Administrative control of the RightScale Account. 

actor: Ability to manage all cloud related activity. 

observer: Ability to view the RightScale account. 

designer: Ability to create ServerTemplates, RightScripts, and Macros. Ability to view local object collections under the Design menu.

library: Ability to import objects from the MultiCloud Marketplace to your local view (collection). The ability to view the MultiCloud Marketplace requires the 'designer' role.

security_manager: Ability to create a cloud Security Group and modify an existing Security Group's port permissions. Ability to view and generate Infrastructure Audit Reports.

server_login: Ability to log into servers. 

publisher: Ability to create sharing groups and share RightScale objects (ServerTemplates, RightScripts, and Macros) with other users.

enterprise_manager: (Enterprise only) Manages all accounts within the enterprise. Send account invitations and grant user role privileges across all accounts in the enterprise. 

lite_user: (Enterprise only) A 'lite_user' has limited access inside the Dashboard. A lite user cannot design or create objects inside the Dashboard such as ServerTemplates, RightScripts, Alert Escalations, etc. 

billing: By default all users of a RightScale account can view billing information. You will be able to see estimated cloud usage costs (Report > Usage Estimate) or the Deployments Budget Estimates under Manage > Deployments > View Dashboard. 

Server Roles

Sometimes the word 'role' refers to a server's role or configuration. For example, when you launch an instance on a cloud infrastructure you are provisioning a "blank" piece of hardware that you can configure to fulfill a specific type of server role. Additionally, you can use different ServerTemplates to configure instances to fulfill certain roles such as dedicated load balancers, application servers, database servers, etc.

Billing and Usage Reporting

RightScale offers reporting tools to help with cost tracking and usage monitoring. Some of these options include:

• Cost Quotas: Cost Quotas are reports found in the Dashboard that are exclusive to Enterprise editions of RightScale. Cost quotas are designed to warn enterprise administrators when one of the RightScale accounts within the enterprise is about to exceed its designated limit for the current month. Most public clouds charge and bill cloud usage on a monthly basis. The Usage Estimate (Reports > Usage Estimate) offers an estimate of all billable cloud-related activity for a particular RightScale account. As an Enterprise admin ('enterprise_manager'), you can set up cost quota alerts (Settings > Enterprise > Accounts) for the RightScale accounts in your Enterprise to better track the account-specific cloud usage costs that are currently being accrued for the current month.
• Cost Estimates: You can view an estimated breakdown of your cloud usage costs (Report > Usage Estimate) including instances, Elastic IPs, data transfers, EBS provisioning, etc. from the RightScale Dashboard. The monthly reports are meant to provide a rough estimate of your cloud usage costs. Actual billing costs may vary.
• Report Manager: Report Manager (Reports > Report Manager) is available in Enterprise accounts and allows you to aggregate usage data across accounts in the enterprise. It allows you to organize usage data by tags placed on accounts, deployments, and servers, export CSV reports on demand or on a scheduled basis, and save common reports for repeated or scheduled use.

SAML

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an XML standard used to authenticate users from an Identity Provider (IdP) to a software provider. SAML allows a user to log on once to a site (an IdP) and have access granted to affiliated websites. In conjunction with our provisioning API, this functionality enables you to authenticate and synchronize with existing identity stores.

RightScale is enabling SAML 2.0-based Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality for Enterprise Plan customers who request this feature. This, combined with our provisioning API, allows for full identity federation including syncing with Active Directory. In addition, we have tested this functionality with our partners Okta and PingIdentity so that you can use their (and similar) SaaS-based Identity Provider.

OAuth

OAuth-compatible authentication and authorization supports a password-less Dashboard user that can login to the API and make authenticated requests. This feature is currently in public beta. Please contact support with any issues. You can enable OAuth by going to Settings > Account Settings > API Credentials. Here you can obtain an API access token which allows you to make changes without logging in.

Support

Next Steps