I've got some exciting news! I've been chatting with a friend of mine, David La Motta - Co-Founder of Emitrom Inc., regarding his cool new product Integra. David was nice enough to give me a demo of his new product and I thought, "This is so cool, I want to share it with my blog friends!". What is Integra you ask? From Emitrom's site, "Integra is an integration, orchestration and automation Platform as a Service, allowing you to make orthogonal components of your IT infrastructure work together for the better good of your business." With Integra you can create workflows, customize them for your customer needs and automate the workflows so you don't have to spend tons of time re-running steps by hand!
I invited David to be a guest blogger on Glick's Gray Matter to share his new product and luckily he accepted! Without further delay, I give you Emitrom’s Integra!
For the original article, please see:
http://emitrom.com/blogs/david/powershell-exposed-via-rest
Got PowerShell? Let Integra expose it via REST
No kidding, right? With Integra, you can expose _any_ PowerShell
(PS) module's cmdlets as Integra actions in a matter of minutes and
without writing a single line of code. The beauty of this is that now
your PS benefits from everything Integra provides. To name a few, your
PS module gets:
- authentication (see the different types we support)
- an automatically generated REST API
- access via SDKs in 8 programming languages
- remote execution via Integra's CLI
- remote execution via Integra's mobile portal
- ...and more
In this post I am going to concentrate on showing you what you
need to do to expose your PS cmdlets via REST. The PowerShell module
we are going to use in this example is the Nimble PS module provided by Justin Rich (thanks, Justin!). As you will see, you could follow the same steps for any other PowerShell module.
Requirements
There are only a few things you will need to follow this awesome example:
- Integra--get a free trial here. The PowerShell Provider is in beta as of this writing, so please make sure to request it.
- vCenter Server Appliance for the Integra vCenter plugin
- Nimble PS module
- CentOS VM for hosting Integra
- Windows VM for hosting the PS module
We are going to end up with a wildly distributed application, on
purpose. Technically speaking, you could run absolutely everything from
a single Windows machine, but that would be no fun. Instead, we will
have the Integra Reactor
running on CentOS communicating with the PowerShell provider running on
Windows. Connecting to the vCenter client and REST endpoint will be
done from my laptop. It is very important to mention that direct
communication with the providers is not allowed; instead, the Reactor acts as the gatekeeper to the provider for a number of reasons: security, communication, scheduling, among other things.
Get Ready
I am not going to cover installing Integra, as that is detailed here and here.
Instead, we'll assume that Integra is up and running on that CentOS
VM, and the PowerShell provider is running on the Windows VM. Our
CentOS VM is running in a datacenter here in the RTP area of NC, and our
Windows VM is running in the Azure cloud. Your environment should look
similar to the following image.
Get Set
With Integra configured and the Nimble (our PS provider in disguise) provider connected, the next thing to do is to install the Nimble PS module
on your Windows VM. This allows us to import it into the Integra
runspace. Create a new action called Import Module, set the Name field
to Nimble, and execute the action. Now the Nimble module's cmdlets are
all available as Integra actions, ready to be configured and executed.
It doesn't get any simpler than that!
Go
Now that the hard (right?) part is over, let us take a look at what
the REST API looks like. We will configure one action and show you the
XML that is returned by the Integra Reactor. With that in hand, you
can use Integra's REST model
to execute any action that you may have configured (as in this
example). You can change parameters to match your environment via REST,
so you have all the control over what gets set and executed.
You can either interact with Integra's REST API via JSON or XML.
For example, our newly configured action Connect Nimble Array looks
like this:
The parameters have been previously set in the Integra vCenter UI,
but nothing prevents you from altering those values before sending the
REST request.
Conclusion
In this short post we saw how to expose a PowerShell module via
REST using Integra. There are extremely important takeaways from this
example--do not let its simplicity fool you into thinking that this
doesn't pack a punch:
- Time to market: the speed of adding new functionality to Integra is unparalleled via the PowerShell provider. If you have a PowerShell module, you can import it and start using it right away.
- PowerShell cmdlets normalized into Integra actions can now be piped, be executed sequentially or concurrently, use Integra variables, be scheduled or ran on demand, have validation in the UI, etc.
- An otherwise confined-to-Windows PowerShell module can have a new meaning in life and be accessed from anywhere via REST. This means that you can concentrate on providing the best PowerShell module you possibly can, and letting Integra handle the REST (pun intended :-).
- True cross-platform operations are now a reality. You may have an Integra workflow that executes a core Windows PowerShell action, whose output is fed to an action on Linux, whose output is fed to the Nimble array, and at the end everything is packed in an email and sent to you. The possibilities become endless.
- Integra provides SDKs in many different languages. REST is not your cup of tea? With Integra you can execute the same PowerShell cmdlets from Java, Python, Ruby or more by leveraging the Integra SDKs.
At Emitrom we are extremely excited about this new PowerShell
provider; it is currently in beta, and we have a few more goodies that
we are adding as we speak. Do drop us a line if you have any questions.
You can always find us via Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Happy RESTing ;-)
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