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Quick Introduction

CBLE is a highly scalable and flexible platform providing a fully automated self-service lab portal making teaching with hands-on virtual lab content easy and fast. It's designed to use cloud-agnostic resources defined in blueprints which use complex dependency-graphs to enable the fastest possible deployments.

Node Graph Node Graph

Before You Continue

Make sure you have installed and configured CBLE using the Installation guide.

Create Your First Provider

CBLE uses Providers to connect to cloud providers. They provide a way to abstract the complex nuance of deploying infrastructure to clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

To get create your first provider:

  1. Navigate to the Providers tab in the main navigation bar
  2. Click the Create button
  3. Give the provider a Name
  4. Enter the Git URL to the provider (see Supported Providers)
  5. Select/Enter a Version to use (dropdown should be auto-populated)
  6. Enter the Configuration for the provider (the provider repository will provide an example configuration)
  7. Click the Create button to create the provider

Note

The provider version can be a Git Tag or Commit Hash

Provider Create Page

Load Your Provider

Providers have to be loaded into the provider cache (see Providers - How it Works) to be used by CBLE. Providers are loaded into the provider cache automatically when CBLE boots, however, after creation they must be loaded manually.

Now that you've created your first provider, you can load the provider by clicking the Load button.

Load Provider Button

If successful, a Loaded Provider! notification should appear.

The usual cause of errors during when loading is an incorrect configuration. Double-check your config and try loading again

If you need to modify the configuration after a provider is loaded, you can use the Reconfigure button to update the configuration without reloading the provider.

Reconfigure Provider Button

Create Your First Blueprint

Blueprints are a way to define an environment that your users can request a copy of. Upon request, the blueprint will be used to create an individual deployment of this environment.

Note

Blueprints will be specific to the provider you've selected. Please visit the provider's repository to find example templates that can be used with your provider.

To create your first blueprint:

  1. Navigate to the Blueprints tab in the main navigation bar
  2. Click the Create button
  3. Give the blueprint a name
  4. Select the provider you just created
  5. Provide a description for the blueprint
  6. Place a sample blueprint from your provider into the template field
  7. Click the Create button to save the blueprint

Create Blueprint Page

Fixing Common Errors

If you get a Failed to update blueprint: failed to load resource: ... error, this indicates something is wrong with your blueprint and your provider is unable to understand it. Make sure to double-check your template syntax.

Request Your First Deployment

Now that you've created your first blueprint, it should appear on the Blueprints page:

Blueprint Available for Request

You're ready to request a deployment of the test environment. To do so, click the Request button.

Deployments consume resources in the cloud and as such each project has defined resource quotas to constrain the amount of resources any given group is using. If a deployment will exceed your resource quotas, CBLE will not allow you to request it.

So, to deploy this blueprint select the default project and then click the Request button:

Request Deployment Page

Your deployment is now being provisioned! It will now show up on the Deployments page. Each deployment has a lease time after which it will automatically be deleted. This is to prevent any one user from keeping deployments around that aren't used.

New Deployment on Deployments Page

Tip

You can customize the name of the deployment by hovering on the name and clicking the icon.

Clicking on the deployment, we now get a visualization of all of the resources we just deployed and can interact with them:

Visualizing your deployment

Tip

You can easily identify resources you can interact with by looking at the dependency graph. A means you can get a console to the resource. A means you can control the power state of the resource.

Resources that support controls will have a icon and allows you to execute actions against a resource such as controlling the power state of the resource.

Resource power controls

Destroy Your Deployment

Now we can destroy the deployment to tear down all of the resources we previously deployed. This will automatically be performed for you after the lease expires for the deployment.

  1. Open the Actions menu
  2. Select the Destroy Deployment option
  3. Click the Destroy button to confirm the destruction of the deployment
Destroy deployment

The deployment is now destroyed!