Open Stack

On 24/01/13 16:28 +0100, Zane Bitter wrote:
>There's been quite a bit of discussion recently about Heat's 
>cfn-tools, which currently comprise a minimalist reimplementation by 
>the Heat developers of Amazon's aws-cfn-bootstrap tools.
>
>It was also brought up on IRC last night that there has been a formal 
>request from Amazon (not yet acted upon) for Ubuntu to include 
>aws-cfn-bootstrap in the distribution.[1]
>
>At the same time, Fedora's Cloud SIG is discussing ways to make 
>Fedora Cloud images "more awesome".[2] Although no specifics have 
>been mentioned, packaging the aws-cfn-bootstrap tools would seem like 
>an obvious possible improvement. The Cloud SIG also has plans for 
>Fedora 19 to introduce builds that target clouds other than EC2, 
>including OpenStack.[3]
>
>Steve Hardy has done a lot of work on Heat to make the data that gets 
>passed to the instance as similar as possible to what gets passed by 
>CloudFormation (e.g. a reference to a WaitConditionHandle now 
>resolves to a pre-signed URL that can be used for signalling). Still, 
>Heat is not able to use the aws-cfn-bootstrap tools directly because 
>they are hard-coded with the CloudFormation endpoints. (There may be 
>other issues too, and more investigation is required.)
>
>However: The aws-cfn-bootstrap tools are open source, under the 
>Apache 2 license. I see little point in continuing to reimplement 
>features piecemeal as we become aware of the need for them.[4] I 
>propose that we instead take the following steps:

Yea, that's good when we started they had a clause that said you
could only use these tools on amazon.

I wish they actually had a repo somewhere, but they just push out
tarballs, someone has published a github mirror:
https://github.com/blake-education/aws-cfn-bootstrap

>
>* Fork the aws-cfn-bootstrap tools with the goal offer creating a 
>cloud-agnostic upstream community (unaffiliated with OpenStack) 
>around them.
>* Modify the tools to read endpoints from a configuration file 
>(perhaps defaulting to the CloudFormation endpoints).
>* Make any further modifications to Heat (and/or cfn-bootstrap) 
>required to implement full interoperability.
>* Package this configurable version of aws-cfn-bootstrap for 
>Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora.
>* Work with Ubuntu and the Fedora Cloud SIG to get this configurable 
>version included in cloud server builds.

Not sure amazon is going to be happy about that;)

We could just use the "alternatives" package to switch to ours
(ours meaning our forked version).

-A

>
>This would not only save us a lot of work, and likely prevent a lot 
>of bugs, but it would also offer a huge advantage to users: a single 
>prebuilt cloud image available from the distro of their choice could 
>run on both AWS and OpenStack without modification.
>
>There is one known issue that anybody wanting to package 
>aws-cfn-bootstrap in a distro would have to circumvent: the current 
>tools are installed (appropriately) in /opt/aws/bin. Amazon, through 
>their example templates, have encouraged people to use the 
>fully-qualified path (e.g. /opt/aws/bin/cfn-init) when calling them, 
>instead of just adding /opt/aws/bin to $PATH. The latter would have 
>made the transition to including the tools in the distro (where 
>packaging in /opt is *not* appropriate) transparent, but the former 
>most certainly does not. I have several ideas for working around 
>this, none of them good ;)
>
>I'd like to apologise at this point for being the guy who shows up 
>with a lot of talk and no code ;). I do think an initial 
>proof-of-concept for Heat integration should be fairly easy to put 
>together, and I intend to start working on it after the g-3 release 
>is out of the way, provided that the suggestion proves sufficiently 
>uncontroversial.
>
>cheers,
>Zane.
>
>
>[1]: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-p-cloud-formations-images
>[2]: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/cloud/2013-January/002219.html
>[3]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FirstClassCloudImages
>[4]: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/heat/+spec/aws-cloudformation-init
>
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