Heat Providers/Environments 101 I've recently been experimenting with some cool new features we've added to Heat over the Havana cycle, testing things out in preparation for the Havana Release. One potentially very powerful new abstraction is the Provider Resource method of defining nested stack resources.  Combined with the new environments capability to map template resource names to non-default implementations, it provides a very flexible way for both users and those deploying Heat to define custom resources based on Heat templates. Firstly let me clarify what nes ..read more

Heat Nested Resource Introspection The following topic has come up a couple of times lately on IRC, so I thought I'd put down some details describing $subject, in a more permanent place :) Nested Stack Resources, Primer/Overview So, Heat has a really powerful feature, which is the ability to nest stack definitions, such that one top-level stack definition may recursively define one or more nested stacks. There are two ways to define a nested stack: Explicitly reference a nested stack template in the parent template (via our implementation of the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resource type ..read more

Roadmap for Heat Havana (part 2) So with havana2 workload and holidays delaying this follow-up post it's probably a bit late to really call this a roadmap, but what follows is a status update and some further details on what we're working on delivering (or have delivered) for Heat's Havana cycle: Ceilometer Integration Some great work has been going on adding alarming features to ceilometer, and recently some patches have been landing integrating Heat with this alarming capability.  This should allow us to move away from maintaining a metric store and alarming functionality inside ..read more

Roadmap for Heat Havana (part 1) It's been quite a while now since the design summit in Portland, and I've been meaning to write some details of the features we discussed at the summit, and in particular those which have appeared now on our plan for Heat's havana development cycle. What follows are some highlights of what we're working on, or expect to be working on over the next weeks/months.  However I'll start with the disclaimer that this plan is a moving target, particularly since we're seeing an increasing number of new contributors whose planned contributions may not yet be captur ..read more

Containerized deployments, debugging basicsSince the Pike release, TripleO has supported deployments with OpenStack services running in containers.  Currently we use docker to run images based on those maintained by the Kolla project. We already have some tips and tricks for container deployment debugging in tripleo-docs, but below are some more notes on my typical debug workflows. Config generation debugging overviewIn the TripleO container architecture, we still use Puppet to generate configuration files and do some bootstrapping, but it is run (inside a container) via a script docker ..read more

Some time ago I wrote a post about debugging TripleO heat templates, which contained some details of possible debug workflows when TripleO deployments fail. In recent releases (since the Pike release) we've made some major changes to the TripleO architecture - we makes more use of Ansible "under the hood", and we now support deploying containerized environments.  I described some of these architectural changes in a talk at the recent OpenStack Summit in Sydney. In this post I'd like to provide a refreshed tutorial on typical debug workflow, primarily focussing on the configuration phase ..read more

OpenStack Days UKYesterday I attended the OpenStack Days UK event, held in London.  It was a very good day and there were a number of interesting talks, and it provided a great opportunity to chat with folks about OpenStack. I gave a talk, titled "Deploying OpenStack at scale, with TripleO, Ansible and Containers", where I gave an update of the recent rework in the TripleO project to make more use of Ansible and enable containerized deployments. I'm planning some future blog posts with more detail on this topic, but for now here's a copy of the slide deck I used, also available on githu ..read more

We've been having a productive week here in Boston at the OpenStack Summit, and one of the sessions I was involved in was a TripleO project Onboarding session. The project onboarding sessions are a new idea for this summit, and provide the opportunity for new or potential contributors (and/or users/operators) to talk with the existing project developers and get tips on how to get started as well as ask any questions and discuss ideas/issues. The TripleO session went well, and I'm very happy to report it was well attended and we had some good discussions.  The session was informal with a ..read more

During the newton/ocata development cycles, TripleO made changes to the architecture so we make use of Mistral (the OpenStack workflow API project) to drive workflows required to deploy your OpenStack cloud. Prior to this change we had workflow defined inside python-tripleoclient, and most API calls were made directly to Heat.  This worked OK but there was too much "business logic" inside the client, which doesn't work well if non-python clients (such as tripleo-ui) want to interact with TripleO. To solve this problem, number of mistral workflows and custom actions have been implemented ..read more

This is a follow-up to my previous post outlining the new composable services interfaces , which covered the basics of the new for Newton composable services model. The final piece of the composability model we've been developing this cycle is the ability to deploy user-defined custom roles, in addition to (or even instead of) the built in TripleO roles (where a role is a group of servers, e.g "Controller", which runs some combination of services). What follows is an overview of this new functionality, the primary interfaces, and some usage examples and a summary of future planned work. F ..read more