Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 44. Calling External Services

We saw in Chapter 42 how external systems can make incoming calls to CloudForms using the RESTful API and run automation instances, perhaps to initiate workflows that we’ve defined.

From Automate we can also make outgoing calls to external systems. We typically use SOAP or RESTful APIs to access theses external services, and there are several Ruby gems that make this easy for us, including Savon (SOAP client), RestClient, XmlSimple and Nokogiri (XML parsers), and fog (a Ruby cloud services library).

We have already seen an example of making a RESTful API connection to the RHEV Manager in Chapter 22. Now we will look at some more ways that we can integrate with external services.¹

Calling a SOAP API Using the Savon Gem

The following snippet makes a SOAP call to an f5 BIG-IP load balancer to add an IP address to a pool (some lines have been omitted for brevity/clarity):

  def call_F5_Pool(soap_action, body_hash=nil)
    servername = nil || $evm.object['servername']
    username   = nil || $evm.object['username']
    password   = nil || $evm.object.decrypt('password')

    require "rubygems"
    gem 'savon', '=2.3.3'
    require "savon"
    require 'httpi'

    # configure httpi gem to reduce verbose logging
    HTTPI.log_level = :info # changing the log level
    HTTPI.log       = false # diable HTTPI logging
    HTTPI.adapter   = :net_http # [:httpclient, :curb, :net_http]

    soap = Savon.client do |s|
      s.wsdl "https://#{servername}/iControl/iControlPortal.cgi? \
                                                       WSDL=LocalLB.Pool"
      s.basic_auth [username ...