Open Stack

Hello,

Rackspace has resourced two dedicated development teams for the sole purpose of contributing new features and capabilities to OpenStack's HEAT project. We are very excited, and would like to share with you what we plan to design and contribute together with you:

1) Open API & DSL - This allows templates to be agnostic to the underlying cloud and encourages community contribution for the betterment of all users across all cloud providers. We want a solution that does not depend on semantics from any single service provider. We think there is a way for HEAT to work equally well with CloudFormation templates, and a completely open template format as well.

2) Declarative Model - Although CloudFormation Templates were designed to be declarative, in practice the templates are very imperative artifacts (for example, those that embed shell scripts). Templates that are expressed using a declarative approach are compact, simple, and portable between clouds that have different services available. We want the cloud implementation specific details to be handled by modules, not wired into the templates. Declarative modeling encourages broad contribution from the user base to improve the overall community library of available solutions. While modeling may be easy to implement, they are more difficult to expand to support generic cloud portable use cases.

3) Modular Implementation - We want HEAT to be modular in a way that's consistent with the level of modularity offered in Nova, Quantum, Cinder and others where a common, extendable API is offered and a variety of extensions may be added for various back-end services and features. We want to keep the architecture as simple as possible while allowing individual cloud operators to add features and capabilities in a way that keeps templates crisp and portable.

4) Auto-Scale Implementation - The solution will allow deployments to scale up and down dynamically based on demand. We want to design and implement this with you. We have considerable experience and resources to bring with us. We have a dedicated team to contribute solutions here.

We look forward to discussing more with you at the Summit in Portland. Leaders from each of our new teams will be there ready to work with you on implementation details.

Regards,

Adrian Otto
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