SafeScale: multicloud management platform

SafeScale is an Infrastructure and Platform as Code tool.

Table of content

• Description
  • SafeScale Infra
  • SafeScale Platform
  • SafeScale Security
• Currently available features
• Contributing
• License

Description

SafeScale offers an APIs and a CLI tools to deploy versatile computing clusters that span multiple Clouds. These APIs and CLIs are divided in 3 service layers:

• SafeScale Infra to manage Cloud infrastructure (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service)
• SafeScale Platform to manage Cloud computing platforms (PaaS - Platform as a Service)
• SafeScale Security to secure user environments

SafeScale Infra

SafeScale Infra offers an API to completely abstract the IaaS services offered by Cloud platforms providers. It allows to:

• Create / Destroy private networks, Create routers, Manage firewall
• Create / Destroy hosts,
• Create / Destroy block and object storage,
• Mount / Unmount object storage as file system,
• Create / Destroy shares, Connect / Disconnect host to/from shares,
• Create / Destroy clusters
• Add / Remove "features" (software components) on hosts and clusters

SafeScale Infra provides a complete abstraction overlay over underlying IaaS APIs to mask their heterogeneity.

SafeScale Platform

Safescale Platform provides PaaS (Platform as a Service) capabilities:

• deploy a standard cluster
• deploy a specific cluster, deployment commands are executed in parallel to improve the speed

Platform can deploy a standard cluster with minimal features:

• cluster management environment: BOH (Bunch Of Hosts, ie cluster without workload orchestrator like Kubernetes), K8S (with Kubernetes)
• one or two gateways, including :
  • a reverse proxy (Kong) with only SSH and HTTPS access allowed by default
  • an internal load balancer over the cluster
• the remote desktop

For example the following command creates a Kubernetes cluster named k8s-clusterusing Normalcomplexity (3 masters and 3 nodes):

$ safescale platform create --flavor k8s --complexity nomal k8s-cluster

Supplemental software and/or configurations can be installed in 2 ways on SafeScale Hosts or Clusters:

• using ssh command (the old and manual way):

  $ safescale ssh run -c "apt install nginx" my-host
  

• using "SafeScale Feature", that can be seen as the "ansible" for SafeScale:

  $ safescale cluster feature add mycluster keycloak
  

A "SafeScale Feature" is a file in YAML format that describes the operations to check/add/remove software and/or configuration on a target (Host or Cluster).

A Feature can describe operations using different methods:

• package: just define the package(s) concerned
• bash: uses bash snippets
• helm (coming soon): uses helm chart, the "package" engine for Kubernetes
• ansible (coming soon): defines playbook to run, SafeScale provising inventory

Additionnaly, a Feature is able to apply:

• reverse proxy rules
• Security Group rules

SafeScale Security

SafeScale Security is a Web API and a Web Portal to create on-demand security gateways to protect Web services along 5 axes: Encryption, Authentication, Authorization, Auditability and Intrusion detection. SafeScale Security relies on Kong, an open source generic proxy to be put in between user and service. Kong intercepts user requests and service responses and executes plugins to empower any API. To build a SafeScale Security gateway 3 plugins are used:

• Dynamic SSL plugin to encrypt traffic between the user and the service protected
• Open ID plugin to connect the Identity and Access Management server, KeyCloak
• UDP Log plugin to connect the Log management system, Logstash The design of a SafeScale Security gateway can be depicted as below:

Currently available abilities

SafeScale is currently under active development and does not yet offer all the abilities planned. However, we are already publishing it with the following ones:

• SafeScale Infra:

  • Create / Destroy private networks
  • Create / Destroy hosts,
  • Create / Destroy block and object storage,
  • Mount object storage on file system,
  • Create Shares, Connect/disconnect host to share,
  • Create / Update/Destroy Security Groups,

• SafeScale Platform:

  • Create / Destroy clusters composed of a network, servers and services currently supported:
    • BOH = Bunch Of Hosts (without any cluster management layer)
    • Kubernetes
  • Add / Remove "features" on host and clusters

• Supported Cloud providers:

  • OVH Public Cloud
  • FlexibleEngine
  • OpenTelekom
  • CloudFerro
  • Generic OpenStack
  • local provider (unstable, not compiled by default)
  • AWS
  • GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
  • Outscale

Contributing

We are strongly interested by new contributions.

If you wish to contribute you can fork the project, make your changes, commit to your repository, and then create a pull request. The development team can then review your contribution and commit it upstream as appropriate.

For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.

Build

See Build file

Usage

See Usage file

License

SafeScale is distributed by CS Systemes d'Information under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please see the third-party notices file for additional copyright notices and license terms applicable to portions of the software.