This guide is designed to get you up and running with nscale on Amazon AWS as quickly as possible, with the same Hello World example used in the Linux and OS X Quick Start Guides.

Before using this Quick Start Guide we need have our AWS image set up, to do this we can follow the AWS Setup Guide before proceeding.

First we need to login to our running AWS instance (see the AWS Setup Guide for more information):

ssh -i <keysfile.pem> ubuntu@<public ip>

The nsd executable is a command line client app, it interacts with a kernel server. Most nsd commands rely entirely on the kernel server, to spin up the kernel server we do the following:

nsd server start

Ideally we would want to include this command in a start up script, when entering a production deployment scenario

If available this command will also start the server that hosts the web based control panel ui (nscale-web)

To get up and running straight away we're going to clone an existing system, for a longer explanation of how to get started from scratch see [Getting Started From Scratch][]

We'll be using nearForm's canonical "Hello World" example.

To clone the system we do,

nsd system clone [email protected]:nearform/nscaledemo.git

It doesn't matter what directory we're in when we do this. nscale manages any imported files internally - we simply interact with the system those files represent through the nsd command line interface.

Let's make sure our system was installed

nsd system list

This should output something like this

Name                           Id
nscaledemo                        e1144711-47bb-5931-9117-94f01dd20f6f

Our cloned system has two containers (see [Containers][]), let's list them:

nsd container list e1144711-47bb-5931-9117-94f01dd20f6f

The nsd help for nsd container list requires a systemid, however we can also reference our system by name

nsd container list nscaledemo

In both cases, nsd should output

Name                 Type            Id                                                 Version         Dependencies
Machine              virtualbox      85d99b2c-06d0-5485-9501-4d4ed429799c                               ""
web                  boot2docker     9ddc6c027-9ce2-5fdg-9936-696d2b3789bb              0.0.1           {}

Our Machine is a virtualbox container, a virtually emulated operating system. This can be thought of as the equivalent of a physical server, or a "machine" in a virtual hosting plan (such as AWS).

The second container (web) is a Docker container, this an isolated OS-like environment that can be run on a host system (in this case our Machine).

So, for this system, the Machine container contains the web container, which contains a microservice (see [Microservices][]) which provides a web server, that responds to requests with an HTML file containing "Hello World!".

nsd container build nscaledemo web

Any time we build a container, our system is modified, this is reflected in the revision list

nsd revision list nscaledemo

To deploy our system in it's latest state, we take the top revision number use it with revision deploy. So if the latest revision id was 2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac we would do:

nsd revision deploy nscaledemo 2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac

If that was successful, if we list our revisions again with nsd revision list nscaledemo the revision we have deployed should have true in the deployed column:

revision             deployed who                                                     time                      description
2a934f8e9cf8c98f2ac… true     davidmarkclements <[email protected]>                                2014-09-03T09:15:23.000Z  built container: 920718f8542201f9d8daf2f430ce0001…

Finally, we can request a page from our web containers web server, we just need to know the address.

The [web microservice][web-app] is an express app that listens on port 8000.

This port is mapped to our host machine make a request to localhost at port 8000.

curl http://localhost:8000

open http://localhost:8000

We should see "Hello World!".

• [Getting Started From Scratch][]
• [Getting Started Migrating][]