Openstack

Wednesday, Strategy, 10:30

• Convener - Adam S
• Scribe - Aaron Kalin (@martinisoft)

Participants

• Steve D
• Steve
• Martin
• Andrew M
• Bart
• David
• Few more...

Summary of Discussions

Using the community cookbooks for setup over setting it up yourself

• Scaling Openstack up and down might be tricky with Chef

Getting started quickly

• There are OpenStack instant environments out there (Pack Stack, Dev Stack, Suse Cloud)

Existing OpenStack Setups with Chef

Getting Chef Client on the VM

• Bootstrap a VM via knife
• Make an image that has Chef already (Can be a problem when new versions of Chef drop, but omnibus cookbook can help with changing versions)
• Cloud Init

Building images with Chef

• Packer
• Cloud Init

Knife Openstack

• Supports booting up a node with specific networking, flavor (memory, CPU, etc), image
• Doesn't support all the options (yet)
• Provision and bootstraps via the knife plugin (Also sets node name and Ohai hints)
• Ohai hints help with detecting cloud providers such as OpenStack

Using knife or scripting around it to build clusters

• Should I be mixing Vagrant and Knife to replicate a Production OpenStack locally
• Maybe Chef Metal, but it's still new so things may break
• OpenStack Heat for orchestration?

OpenStack Heat

• Lets you template clusters for OpenStack
• Could be used to setup Chef infrastructure to support OpenStack
• Can specify dependencies at the VM level (database nodes, web, etc that depend on each other to exist)
• Can do auto scaling and monitoring of nodes

Misc Orchestration tools

• BOSH - Kind of complicated to solve problems with orchestrating things like OpenStack
• Maybe a service like Consul (Consul.io) for service discovery to help with OpenStack
• etcd - Service discovery with OpenStack
• Terraform - Scripted service setup over various providers, might support OpenStack later?

What will we do now? What needs to happen next?

• Check out OpenStack Heat
• Check out Chef Metal to see if it can be used with OpenStack because it has basic resource abstraction and orchestration EDIT: @jjasghar I've created this: https://github.com/jjasghar/chef-openstack-testing-stack which leverages chef-metal to build openstack. I'm in the process of getting multi-node setups done now.