Packet Metadata for SaltStack
Published: 2020-10-24 09:57:23

---
title: Packet Metadata for SaltStack
published: true
date: 2020-08-03 00:00:00 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://rawkode.com/articles/packet-metadata-for-saltstack/
---

In my last [article](./saltstack-on-packet-with-pulumi), we spun up some bare metal compute on [Packet](https://www.packet.com) with [Pulumi](https://www.pulumi.com) and installed [SaltStack](https://www.saltstack.com).

In order to use SaltStack to provision our workloads on our servers, we need a way to identify which machines should be provisioned with what workload. SaltStack uses [Grains](https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/grains/) to do this ... and there's a metadata grain that can read metadata from cloud providers; unfortunately, it doesn't support Packet.

Drats ☹️

Happy news though, SaltStack is rather extensible; as long as you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty with Python.

## Writing a Custom Grain

Writing a SaltStack grain module is SUPER easy. Lets take a look at the simplest implementation I can put together.

```
def test():
    return dict(test={
        "name": "David",
        "age": "18",
    })

```

Yeah, yeah. I know I'm not 18 anymore. Shush.

Grain modules are Python functions that return key value pairs. This code above returns a grain named "test" with the key/value pairs `name = David` and `age = 18`. This means we can run `salt minion-1 grains.item test` and we'll see:

```
minion-1:
    ----------
    test:
        ----------
        name:
            David
        age:
            18

```

Of course, we don't want to return hared coded key values! We want to return information about our servers from Packet's [metadata API](https://www.packet.com/developers/docs/servers/key-features/metadata/).

The code to handle this isn't particularly complicated. In-fact, performing a HTTP request in Python is really simple 😀

Lets take a look.

```
import json
import logging
import salt.utils.http as http

# Setup logging
log = logging.getLogger( __name__ )

# metadata server information
HOST = "https://metadata.packet.net/metadata"

def packet_metadata():
    response = http.query(HOST)
    metadata = json.loads(response["body"])

    log.error(metadata)

    grains = {}
    grains["id"] = metadata["id"]
    grains["iqn"] = metadata["iqn"]
    grains["plan"] = metadata["plan"]
    grains["class"] = metadata["class"]
    grains["facility"] = metadata["facility"]

    grains["tags"] = metadata["tags"]

    return dict(packet_metadata=grains)

```

The important lines here are these three:

```
HOST = "https://metadata.packet.net/metadata"

response = http.query(HOST)
metadata = json.loads(response["body"])

```

We first query the metadata API endpoint, defined by the variable `HOST`. We then decode the body of the response into a Python dict, using `json.loads`.

This gives us access to every bit of metadata returned by the Packet metadata API. That looks like:

```
{
  "id": "c5ce85c5-1eef-4581-90b6-88a91e47e207",
  "hostname": "master-1",
  "iqn": "iqn.2020-08.net.packet:device.c5ce85c5",
  "operating_system": {
    "slug": "debian_9",
    "distro": "debian",
    "version": "9",
    "license_activation": {
      "state": "unlicensed"
    },
    "image_tag": "b32a1f31b127ef631d6ae31af9c6d8b69dcaa9e9"
  },
  "plan": "c2.medium.x86",
  "class": "c2.medium.x86",
  "facility": "ams1",
  "private_subnets": ["10.0.0.0/8"],
  "tags": ["role/salt-master"],
  "ssh_keys": [
    "ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBGf0w9b+lPcZhsNHU8Sw5hJPBhpNICTNkjlBz9jxtLbWNGvHTE1lBeXU5VA2/7cuYw48apHmMURHFtK5AZx3srg="
  ],
  "storage": {
    "disks": [
      {
        "device": "/dev/sdd",
        "wipeTable": true,
        "partitions": [
          {
            "label": "BIOS",
            "number": 1,
            "size": "512M"
          },
          {
            "label": "SWAP",
            "number": 2,
            "size": "3993600"
          },
          {
            "label": "ROOT",
            "number": 3,
            "size": 0
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "filesystems": [
      {
        "mount": {
          "device": "/dev/sdd1",
          "format": "vfat",
          "point": "/boot/efi",
          "create": {
            "options": ["32", "-n", "EFI"]
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "mount": {
          "device": "/dev/sdd3",
          "format": "ext4",
          "point": "/",
          "create": {
            "options": ["-L", "ROOT"]
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "mount": {
          "device": "/dev/sdd2",
          "format": "swap",
          "point": "none",
          "create": {
            "options": ["-L", "SWAP"]
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "network": {
    "bonding": {
      "mode": 4,
      "link_aggregation": "bonded",
      "mac": "50:6b:4b:b4:a9:3a"
    },
    "interfaces": [
      {
        "name": "eth0",
        "mac": "50:6b:4b:b4:a9:3a",
        "bond": "bond0"
      },
      {
        "name": "eth1",
        "mac": "50:6b:4b:b4:a9:3b",
        "bond": "bond0"
      }
    ],
    "addresses": [
      {
        "id": "5d28837b-29c5-4505-bb05-930fd3760bac",
        "address_family": 4,
        "netmask": "255.255.255.252",
        "created_at": "2020-08-03T14:07:50Z",
        "public": true,
        "cidr": 30,
        "management": true,
        "enabled": true,
        "network": "147.75.84.128",
        "address": "147.75.84.130",
        "gateway": "147.75.84.129",
        "parent_block": {
          "network": "147.75.84.128",
          "netmask": "255.255.255.252",
          "cidr": 30,
          "href": "/ips/7a30c2bf-f0e5-402c-b0c0-b8ab03359e63"
        }
      },
      {
        "id": "937552c6-cf1a-474d-9866-9fb1e0525503",
        "address_family": 4,
        "netmask": "255.255.255.254",
        "created_at": "2020-08-03T14:07:49Z",
        "public": false,
        "cidr": 31,
        "management": true,
        "enabled": true,
        "network": "10.80.76.4",
        "address": "10.80.76.5",
        "gateway": "10.80.76.4",
        "parent_block": {
          "network": "10.80.76.0",
          "netmask": "255.255.255.128",
          "cidr": 25,
          "href": "/ips/8f8cd919-165a-4e62-b461-af7c15a25ec4"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "customdata": {},
  "specs": {
    "cpus": [
      {
        "count": 1,
        "type": "AMD EPYC 7401P 24-Core Processor @ 2.0GHz"
      }
    ],
    "memory": {
      "total": "64GB"
    },
    "drives": [
      {
        "count": 2,
        "size": "120GB",
        "type": "SSD",
        "category": "boot"
      },
      {
        "count": 2,
        "size": "480GB",
        "type": "SSD",
        "category": "storage"
      }
    ],
    "nics": [
      {
        "count": 2,
        "type": "10Gbps"
      }
    ],
    "features": {}
  },
  "switch_short_id": "f8dd5e3f",
  "volumes": [],
  "api_url": "https://metadata.packet.net",
  "phone_home_url": "http://tinkerbell.ams1.packet.net/phone-home",
  "user_state_url": "http://tinkerbell.ams1.packet.net/events"
}

```

I decided not to make all of this available within the grains system, as only a few data points make sense for scheduling workloads. Hence, I cherry pick out the attributes I want for the next demo. You can pick and choose whatever you want too.

```
grains = {}
grains["id"] = metadata["id"]
grains["iqn"] = metadata["iqn"]
grains["plan"] = metadata["plan"]
grains["class"] = metadata["class"]
grains["facility"] = metadata["facility"]

grains["tags"] = metadata["tags"]

return dict(packet_metadata=grains)

```

## Provisioning the Custom Grain

Now that we have a custom grain, we need to update our Pulumi code to install this on our Salt master.

**NB** : We **only** need to make this grain available on our Salt master, as the Salt master takes responsibility for syncing custom grains to the minions.

I've updated our [user-data.sh](https://gitlab.com/rawkode/packet-examples/-/blob/master/pulumi-saltstack/src/salt-master/user-data.sh) to create the directory we need and added the mustache template syntax that allows us to inject the Python script. We use `&` before the variable name to request that mustache doesn't escape our quotes to HTML entities ... I only learnt that today 😂

```
mkdir -p /srv/salt/_grains

cat <<EOF >/srv/salt/_grains/packet_metadata.py
{{ &PACKET_METADATA_PY }}
EOF

```

Next up, we provide the Python script at render time and provide some tags for our servers when we create them.

```
const pythonPacketMetadataGrain = fs
  .readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, "..", "salt", "packet_metadata.py"))
  .toString();

const saltMaster = new Device(`master-${name}`, {
  // ... code omitted for brevity
  userData: mustache.render(bootstrapString, {
    PACKET_METADATA_PY: pythonPacketMetadataGrain,
  }),
  // Add tags to this server
  tags: ["role/salt-master"],
});

```

### Syncing Custom Grains

Finally, we need to tell our Salt master to sync the grains to our minions.

```
salt "*" saltutil.grains_sync

```

You can now confirm the custom grain is working with:

```
root@master-1:~# salt "*" grains.item packet_metadata
minion-1:
    ----------
    packet_metadata:
        ----------
        class:
            c2.medium.x86
        facility:
            ams1
        id:
            ab0bc2ba-557b-4d99-a1eb-0beec02adff2
        iqn:
            iqn.2020-08.net.packet:device.ab0bc2ba
        plan:
            c2.medium.x86
        tags:
            - role/salt-minion
master-1:
    ----------
    packet_metadata:
        ----------
        class:
            c2.medium.x86
        facility:
            ams1
        id:
            97ce9196-077d-4ce9-82a5-d58bf59d0dbc
        iqn:
            iqn.2020-08.net.packet:device.97ce9196
        plan:
            c2.medium.x86
        tags:
            - role/salt-master

```

That's it! Next time we'll take a look at using our tags to provision and schedule our workloads.

See you then.