Arbutus Cloud Computing Guide

Author

Sky (Kehan) Sheng

Welcome

This guide provides comprehensive instructions for working with Arbutus, Compute Canada’s OpenStack cloud platform, and managing object storage with S3.

Author

Sky (Kehan) Sheng

  • University of British Columbia Animal Welfare Program
  • skysheng.io

Quick Cheatsheet (For Returning Users)

If you’ve already completed the tutorials and just need to get back up and running quickly, here are the essential commands:

# Move to the local directory where you cloned https://github.com/skysheng7/awp-arbutus-login.git
cd awp-arbutus-login

# Build and start the Docker container with OpenStack tools 
# (make sure you have Docker Desktop running)
make docker

# Load your OpenStack credentials into the environment
source def-ubcawp-dev-openrc.sh

# Test S3 connection (if already configured)
s3cmd ls

Access Videos Through URL

Once you make your bucket public, you can access videos and files directly through URLs in this format:

http://object-arbutus.cloud.computecanada.ca/BUCKET_NAME/FILE_NAME

Note: The bucket must be made public first using:

s3cmd setacl --acl-public -r s3://BUCKET_NAME/

Full Tutorials

  1. Getting Started - Prerequisites and installation
  2. Arbutus Authentication - Setting up OpenStack authentication
  3. S3 Storage Setup - Configuring s3cmd for object storage
  4. S3 Operations - Working with buckets and files
  5. Command Cheatsheet - Quick reference for common commands

What is Arbutus?

Arbutus is Compute Canada’s OpenStack cloud platform that provides:

  • Virtual machines and compute resources
  • Object storage (S3-compatible)
  • Networking and security groups
  • Image management

Additional Resources