Polaris [GCP] - Getting Started with VAST on Cloud

Introduction

Welcome to the initial setup guide for your Polaris Tenant portal.

Polaris serves as a centralized, global control plane designed to help your organization easily deploy, govern, and manage VAST clusters across hybrid and multicloud environments.

For teams looking to manage global infrastructure from a common interface setting up your Polaris tenant portal unlocks three core organizational benefits:

• Hands-Off Automation: Instead of manually configuring servers, you simply define what your ideal infrastructure should look like. Polaris uses a "desired-state" model, meaning it automatically handles the heavy lifting of provisioning, upgrading, and maintaining your nodes in the background.

• Flexible, On-Demand Scaling: Polaris integrates directly with cloud marketplaces. This allows your team to easily spin up long-term environments, or launch temporary, short-lived clusters for specific workloads that automatically clean themselves up when the job is done.

• Simplified Operations: Just as VAST hides the complexity of where your data is physically stored, Polaris hides the complexity of where your hardware is located. To your users and applications, your entire multicloud infrastructure looks, feels, and operates like a single, unified environment.

This guide will walk you through the foundational steps to configure your tenant portal for the first time, laying the groundwork for a simplified, automated cloud ecosystem. It is not intended as a detailed guide to using the vastcloud cli.

Creating your Polaris Tenant and first user.

After completing the order through the Marketplace you will receive an email inviting you to join the VAST Data Cloud.

Click on the link and you will be taken to the first screen =>

Update your Polaris Profile - First/Last Name:

Set a Password:

Account is Updated - “Continue” to Login to Polaris =>

Login to Portal - Use the email you entered in the Private Offer, you can add other users later.

Main Polaris Portal:

• The Knowledge Base section takes you to standard VAST support sites and documentation.

• The upper right box is your capacity allocation and subscription information.

To continue on to your first deployment go to the next section:

“Create Your First Deployment”

Takes you to this screen ->

Deployment Basics

• Name - Must be unique and use standard GCP naming conventions

• GCP Project ID - ID, not the name of the Project you will deploy in

• Region - Regions with Z3 will be listed

• Zone - Zones in the region (not all zones in a region have the same instance availability)

• Instance Type - Pre-chosen, currently only one choice

Capacity/Deployment Type

Single node or full production

Tags -

Option - use if your organization requires them - will be applied to all taggable resources created (must be lower case).

Review

Create Deployment

Cluster Deployment - vastcloud

Install vastcloud binary:

Copy the install command for your operating system and switch to a terminal - Linux, Mac OS or PowerShell.

In Linux Console install vastcloud binary-

May need to update $PATH to include /usr/local/bin. Some Linux distributions no longer use /usr/local/bin.

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/polaris-vastcloud/install_vastcloud.sh | bash

% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  6544  100  6544    0     0  22041      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 22033
[INFO] Detecting system...
[INFO] Detected: linux/amd64
[INFO] Checking for cloud CLI tools...
[INFO] All cloud CLI tools are already installed
[INFO] Downloading from linux-amd64/vastcloud...
######################################################################## 100.0%
[WARN] Cannot write to /usr/local/bin, trying with sudo...
[sudo] password for karlv:
[INFO] Installed to: /usr/local/bin/vastcloud (with sudo)
[INFO] Installation successful!
[INFO] Run 'vastcloud --help' to get started

Try on another system - It will warn if the cloud SDKs aren’t installed

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/polaris-vastcloud/install_vastcloud.sh | bash

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  6544  100  6544    0     0   6774      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  6767

[INFO] Detecting system...
[INFO] Detected: linux/amd64
[INFO] Checking for cloud CLI tools...
[WARN] The following cloud CLI tools are not installed:
  - awscli
  - azure-cli
[WARN] Homebrew is not installed. Please install the cloud CLI tools manually:
[INFO]   - Google Cloud SDK: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/install
[INFO]   - AWS CLI: https://aws.amazon.com/cli/
[INFO]   - Azure CLI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli
[INFO]   - Terraform: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/install
[INFO] Downloading from linux-amd64/vastcloud...
######################################################################## 100.0%
[WARN] Cannot write to /usr/local/bin, trying with sudo...
[INFO] Installed to: /usr/local/bin/vastcloud (with sudo)
[INFO] Installation successful!
[INFO] Run 'vastcloud --help' to get started
karlv@devops01:~$

NOTES:

• The install script URL is the same for both Linux and macOS. The script automatically detects the platform and installs the appropriate binary.

• On macOS, the installer uses Homebrew for dependency management where applicable.

• On Windows, the installer will install PowerShell 7 if it is not already present.

• The installer checks for required dependencies, including cloud CLIs (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Terraform. If any components are missing, it will report them but will not automatically install all dependencies.

• The download size is approximately 100 MB.

• Administrative privileges (sudo) may be required to install the binary to system paths such as /usr/local/bin. 

What the Installer Does

When executed, the installer will:

1. Detect the operating system and architecture

2. Verify the presence of required cloud CLI tools

3. Download the appropriate vastcloud binary

4. Install the binary to a standard location (e.g., /usr/local/bin)

5. Provide guidance if any dependencies are missing

Authenticating with vastcloud and gcloud sdk

The Polaris service operates across all three major cloud providers, and the vastcloud CLI enables you to manage your VAST clusters from a single, unified interface on your local workstation.

Each working session requires authentication to both your cloud provider and Polaris. This ensures that the CLI can access and manage the underlying infrastructure as well as the VAST control plane.

Description

The vastcloud login command initiates authentication with Polaris. By default, this command opens a browser window and redirects you through a Keycloak/OAuth login flow. Upon successful authentication, access and refresh tokens are stored locally and used for subsequent API requests.

In addition, a bootstrap token is obtained from the Polaris service and used for Terraform-based operations. This token is automatically fetched by vastcloud CLI and injected into Terraform during execution.

Authentication Flow

1. Authenticate to cloud provider using its native CLI (e.g., AWS CLI, Azure CLI, or gcloud)

2. Authenticate to Polaris service using vastcloud CLI

3. vastcloud CLI retrieves a bootstrap token from Polaris and provides it to Terraform for infrastructure operations.

Creating a Cluster:

Once authentication and context selection are complete, you can manage your VAST clusters using the vastcloud CLI. The CLI supports standard lifecycle operations:

• Create a cluster

• List clusters

• View cluster details/configuration

• Delete a cluster

Cluster Creation Workflow (Diagram)

The diagram below illustrates the execution workflow when creating a VAST cluster using vastcloud:

Cluster Creation Workflow Steps:

1. Create deployment in the Polaris portal.

2. Use the vastcloud CLI to create a cluster

vastcloud cluster create gcp-kv-myfirstdeployment

This command triggers the automated workflow shown in the diagram above, where the CLI:

1. Fetches the cluster definition from the Polaris service using a secure token context

2. Retrieves project information from the cloud provider (e.g., GCP, AWS, or Azure)

3. Prepares and executes a terraform plan/apply to provision the cluster resources

If everything goes well with no errors it will take approximately 50-60min to deploy a VAST Cluster in GCP.

Appendix A: Cloud SDK Authentication Configuration

Many cloud users have more than one identity that they use to administer their cloud resources with a split between identities used for automation and identities used to administer the portal. It is important to understand which identity you are authenticated as when running the Polaris CLI.

Each cloud has a different way of partitioning these identities and different best practices.

AWS: Named Profiles

AWS uses Named Profiles stored in ~/.aws/credentials. You might have a [default] profile for your daily work and a [prod-automation] profile for specific tasks.

• Best Practice: Never hardcode credentials. Use aws configure sso to link your CLI to your corporate identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, etc.), which allows you to switch roles without managing permanent access keys.

• Switching: export AWS_PROFILE=marketing-admin

Azure: Subscriptions and Tenants

Azure relies on Subscriptions. A single login can have access to multiple subscriptions across different tenants.

• Best Practice: Use az login for interactive sessions. For automation, use Service Principals (az ad sp create-for-rbac) and authenticate via az login --service-principal.

• Switching: az account set --subscription "Production-Sub"

GCP: Workspace account vs Service Account

In Google Cloud, the distinction between a Workspace/User Account and a Service Account is essentially the difference between a "Human" and a "Robot."

• The Split: You use your Google Workspace identity (your work email) for manual administration in the web portal and interactive CLI tasks, while Service Accounts are project-based identities used for automated scripts, CI/CD, and server-side applications