The first step in creating a new fabric in the cloud is to create a Fabric Server instance. A Fabric Server is a container with a Fabric Registry Agent deployed inside it (there must be at least one Fabric Server in a fabric). You can think of it as a seed for the rest of the fabric.

The fabric:container-create-cloud console command, which creates the Fabric Server, is a powerful command that does a lot of things:

To create a Fabric Server on a micro instance, t1.micro (in Amazon's free usage tier) using a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 image, enter the following console command:

JBossFuse:karaf@root> fabric:container-create-cloud --name aws-ec2 --ensemble-server
--new-user admin --new-user-password admin --zookeeper-password admin
--hardwareId t1.micro --os-family rhel --os-version 6.0 registry

This command creates a container called registry and the --ensemble-server option makes the new container a Fabric Server. This command can take a minute or two to complete. If it is successfully, you should see output like the following:

Looking up for compute service.
Creating 1 nodes in the cloud. Using operating system: rhel. It may take a while ...
Node fabric-24be8a5c has been created.
Configuring firewall.
Installing fabric agent on container registry. It may take a while...
Overriding resolver to publichostname.
                  [id] [container]                    [public addresses]             [status]                       
  us-east-1/i-24be8a5c registry                       [50.19.18.91]                  success 

The amount of memory available in a micro instance is a bit limited for a Fuse ESB Enterprise container instance. If you want to create a fabric for a production deployment, it is typically better to use at least a small instance, m1.small. You can create a small instance, as follows:

karaf@root> fabric:container-create-cloud --name aws-ec2 --ensemble-server
--new-user admin --new-user-password admin --zookeeper-password admin
--hardwareId m1.small --os-family rhel --os-version 6.0 registry

	Important
	An m1.small instance is not covered by the Amazon free usage tier and incurs an hourly usage charge (until the instance is terminated).

It should now be possible to log on to the new compute instance using SSH. Open a new command prompt and enter the following command:

ssh 50.19.18.91

Where you provide the compute instance's public IP address as the argument to the ssh command (you could also use the compute instance's public hostname). The ssh command uses the default RSA private key as credentials.

If you did not put your SSH key pair in the default location, you can specify the private key location explicitly, as follows:

ssh -i PrivateKeyFile 50.19.18.91

If you want to see all of the hardware options available, use the jclouds:hardware-list console command:

karaf@root> jclouds:hardware-list 
[id]                 [cpu] [cores]  [ram]
cc1.4xlarge           32.0     8.0 23552.0
cg1.4xlarge           32.0     8.0 22528.0
cc2.8xlarge           88.0    16.0 61952.0
t1.micro               1.0     1.0  630.0
c1.medium              5.0     2.0 1740.0
c1.xlarge             20.0     8.0 7168.0
m1.large               4.0     2.0 7680.0
m1.small               1.0     1.0 1740.0
m1.medium              2.0     1.0 3750.0
m1.xlarge              8.0     4.0 15360.0
m2.xlarge              6.5     2.0 17510.0
m2.2xlarge            13.0     4.0 35020.0
m2.4xlarge            26.0     8.0 70041.0

If you want to find out what machine images are available on Amazon EC2, enter the following console command:

karaf@root> jclouds:image-list

Fabric automatically configures an Amazon EC2 security group for the new containers. All of the containers in a fabric should belong to the same security group. By default, Fabric adds all of the cloud containers to the fabric group. If necessary, you can specify the group explicitly by specifying the --group option on the fabric:container-create-cloud command.