Setting Up a Cluster on Azure with Terraform

Setting Up Your Bacalhau Multi-Region Cluster on Azure 🚀

Welcome to the guide for setting up your own Bacalhau cluster across multiple Azure regions! This guide will walk you through creating a robust, distributed compute cluster that's perfect for running your Bacalhau workloads.

What You'll Build

Think of this as building your own distributed supercomputer! Your cluster will provision compute nodes spread across different Azure regions for global coverage.

Before You Start

You'll need a few things ready:

• Terraform (version 1.0.0 or newer)

• A running Bacalhau orchestrator node

• Azure CLI installed and set up

• An active Azure subscription

• Your subscription ID handy

• An SSH key pair for securely accessing your nodes

We recommend using Expanso Cloud to create your network! But if you'd like to set up a cluster on your own, you can use our tool Andaime to do this too.

If you have any questions about the platform - please contact us on Slack or Email us!

Quick Setup Guide

1. First, create a terraform.tfvars.json file with your Azure details:

   cp terraform.tfvars.example.json terraform.tfvars.json

2. Open up terraform.tfvars.json and fill in your Azure details:

    "subscription_id": "f67231aa-8387-498b-9ca3-EXAMPLE",
    "app_tag": "bacalhau-cluster",
    "resource_group_region": "eastus",
    "username": "bacalhau-runner",
    "public_key": "~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub",
    "bacalhau_data_dir": "/bacalhau_data",
    "bacalhau_node_dir": "/bacalhau_node",
    "bacalhau_config_file_path": "./config/config.yaml",
   
    "locations": {
        "eastus": {
            "machine_type": "Standard_D4_v4",
            "node_count": 1
        }
   }

3. Update your config/config.yaml with your orchestrator information. Specifically, these lines:

  Orchestrators:
    - nats://EXAMPLE-7a02-4083-bf08-bcc2f5fbc025.us1.dev-cloud.expanso.dev:4222
  Auth:
    Token: "EXAMPLE-aEEFukWVffnf5jb9QkpNnwfiBWEk3475csM7ysudpbFTzYBap5c7sWr6"

1. Let Terraform get everything ready:

   terraform init

2. Launch your cluster:

   terraform apply

Understanding the Configuration

The infrastructure is organized into modules:

• Network: Creates VNets and subnets in each region

• Security Group: Sets up NSGs with rules for SSH, HTTP, and NATS

• Instance: Provisions VMs with cloud-init configuration

Taking Your Cluster for a Test Drive

Once everything's up and running, let's make sure it works!

1. First, make sure you have the Bacalhau CLI installed. You can read more about installing the CLI here.

2. Setup your configuration to point at your orchestrator node:

   bacalhau config set -c API.Host=<ip-address-of-orchestrator>

3. Check on the health of your nodes:

   bacalhau node list

4. Run a simple test job:

   bacalhau docker run docker.io/bacalhauproject/hello-world

5. Check on your jobs:

   bacalhau list

6. Get your results:

   bacalhau get <job-id>

Troubleshooting Tips

Having issues? Here are some common solutions:

Deployment Problems

• Double-check your Azure permissions

• Make sure your subscription is active

• Verify that all needed resource providers are registered

Node Health Issues

• Look at the logs on a node: journalctl -u bacalhau-startup.service

• Check Docker logs on a node: docker logs <container-id>

• Make sure that port 4222 isn't blocked

Job Running Troubles

• Verify your NATS connection settings

• Check if nodes are properly registered

• Make sure compute is enabled in your config

Cleaning Up

When you're done, clean everything up with:

terraform destroy

Need to Check on Things?

If you need to peek under the hood, here's how:

1. Find your node IPs:

   terraform output deployment_status

2. SSH into a node:

   ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa <username>@<public-ip>

3. Check on Docker:

   docker ps

4. Go into the container on the node:

   CONTAINER_ID=$(docker ps --filter name=^/bacalhau_node --format '{{.ID}}' | head -n1)
   docker exec -it $CONTAINER_ID /bin/bash

Understanding the Configuration Files

Here's what each important file does in your setup:

Core Files

• main.tf: Your main Terraform configuration

• variables.tf: Where input variables are defined

• outputs.tf: What information Terraform will show you

Modules

• modules/network: Handles VNet and subnet creation

• modules/securityGroup: Manages network security groups

• modules/instance: Provisions VMs with cloud-init

Cloud-Init and Docker Setup

• cloud-init/init-vm.yml: Sets up your VM environment, installs packages, and gets services running

• config/docker-compose.yml: Runs Bacalhau in a privileged container with all the right volumes and health checks

Azure Specific Commands

For ensuring that you have configured your Azure CLI correctly, here are some commands you can use:

Get available Azure locations

az account list-locations --query "[].{Name:name, DisplayName:displayName}" -o table

Get available VM sizes in a region

az vm list-sizes --location eastus --query "[].{Name:name, vCPUs:numberOfCores, MemoryGB:memoryInMb, GPUs:gpus}" --output table

Get your subscription ID

az account show --query "id"

Need Help?

If you get stuck or have questions:

• Check out the official Bacalhau Documentation

• Open an issue in our GitHub repository

• Join our Slack

We're here to help you get your cluster running smoothly! 🌟