Open Stack

Its about both high quality shared heat template components like, a place to house:
https://github.com/EMSL-MSC/heat-templates/tree/master/cfn/lib

But also a common place for developers to congregate around producing production worthy cloud scaled app templates. So, like your mongodb cluster example. I know these sorts of templates have been written over and over again and not shared. I even wrote a set myself: https://github.com/EMSL-MSC/heat-templates/tree/master/hot/MongoDB a while back. Its gotten a bit bit rotten though. If it was CI'ed in an OpenStack repo, it could be kept in much better shape.

I know our organization has written chef server templates too, and j^2 just wrote one from scratch for the app catalog.

I think the app catalog project would benefit greatly by way of a greatly increased number of production ready heat templates, if there was a good place to start building them in the open.

The 5 +1's idea sounds like a reasonable starting point to me. If nothing else, it provides some valuable peer feedback to contributors on how they may improve the templates until a big enough community can be formed to have cores specifically for the repo.  Right now, users writing their own templates don't get any feedback unless they know to ask in the right places. This process ends up creating templates that aren't very portable across clouds and therefore not very suitable for the app catalog.

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Ryan Brown [rybrown at redhat.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2015 11:55 AM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [app-catalog][heat] Heat template contributors repo

On 08/06/2015 01:53 PM, Christopher Aedo wrote:
> Today during the app-catalog IRC meeting we talked about hosting Heat
> templates for contributors.  Right now someone who wants to create
> their own templates can easily self-host them on github, but until
> they get people pointed at it, nobody will know about their work on
> that template, and getting guidance and feedback from all the people
> who know Heat well takes a fair amount of effort.

Discoverability is a problem, but so is ownership in the shared repo
case. There's also the heat-templates repo, which has some example
content and such.

> What do you think about us creating a new repo (app-catalog-heat
> perhaps), and collectively we could encourage those interested in
> contributing Heat templates to host them there?  Ideally members of
> the Heat community would become reviewers of the content, and give
> guidance and feedback.

I think being able to review something requires a lot more than "hey we
have a central/shared repo," including having some shared purpose and
knowledge of the goal.

Of course, people with heat knowledge can look at templates and say
things like "well that's not valid YAML," but that's not really a code
review. I'd much rather see folks come to IRC or ask.openstack with
specific questions so we can 1) answer them or 2) improve our docs.

Having a shared repo of "here are some heat templates" doesn't strike me
as incredibly useful, especially if the templates don't all go together
and make one big thingy.

> It would also allow us to hook into OpenStack
> CI so these templates could be tested, and contributors would have a
> better sense of the utility/portability of their templates.  Over time
> it could lead to much more exposure for all the useful Heat templates
> people are creating.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -Christopher

What do you imagine these templates being for? Are people creating
little reusable snippets/nested stacks that can be incorporated into
someone else's infrastructure? Or standalone templates for stuff like
"here, instant mongodb cluster"?

Also, the obvious question of the central repo is "how does reviewing
work?" are heat cores expected to also be cores on this new repo, or
maybe just take anything that gets 5 +1's?

--
Ryan Brown / Software Engineer, Openstack / Red Hat, Inc.

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