Open Stack

Hi all,

In preparation of the OpenStack Summit in Paris next week, I'm hoping to
speak to some people in the OpenStack foundation about the benefits of a
partnership with Hashicorp, who make fantastic tools like Vagrant and
Packer (and others).

As a n00b aspiring to become an OpenStack contributor, the variety of
Vagrant devstack environments is pretty overwhelming. It appears to me that
it really depends on what project you are contributing to, which denotes
which devstack you should use. The ones I have tried take a long time (45
mins+) to provision from scratch.

One aspect which I am acutely aware of is developer productivity and 45
minutes is a lot of time. Packer was designed to help alleviate bottleneck,
and Vagrantcloud has inbuilt support for the versioning of Vagrant boxes.
It would be a pretty straight forward exercise to use Packer to do a daily
(or however often) build of a devstack box and upload it to Vagrantcloud
for developers to download. With a decent internet connection that time
would be significantly less than 45 minutes.

I would really like to think that this community should also be able to
come to a consensus over what to include in a "standard" devstack. That
there currently seems to be many different flavours cannot help with issues
of fragmentation between so many different moving parts to build an
OpenStack environment.

Another big issue that I hope to address with the foundation, is the
integration of Hashicorp's tools with OpenStack.

The various Vagrant plugins to add OpenStack as a provider is a mess. There
is one specific for Rackspace who have a different Keystone API, and at
least 3 others for the vanilla OpenStack:
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-rackspace
https://github.com/ggiamarchi/vagrant-openstack-provider
https://github.com/cloudbau/vagrant-openstack-plugin
https://github.com/FlaPer87/vagrant-openstack

The significance of not having an "official" provider, for one example, is
when you use Packer to build an image in OpenStack and try to post-process
it into a Vagrant box, it bombs with this error:

==> openstack: Running post-processor: vagrant
Build 'openstack' errored: 1 error(s) occurred:

* Post-processor failed: Unknown artifact type, can't build box:
mitchellh.openstack


Because Packer doesn't know what Vagrant expects the provider to be, as
explained here <https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues/776>.

In my opinion this a pretty big issue holding back the wider acceptance of
OpenStack. When I am at a customer and introduce them to tools like Vagrant
and Packer and how well they work with AWS, I still avoid the conversation
about OpenStack when I would really love to put them on our (Elastx's)
public cloud.

What say you? Could I get a +1 from those who see this as a worthwhile
issue?

Cheers,

Phil.
-- 
*Philip Cheong*
*Elastx *| Public and Private PaaS
email: philip.cheong at elastx.se
office: +46 8 557 728 10
mobile: +46 702 870 814
twitter: @Elastx <https://twitter.com/Elastx>
http://elastx.se
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