Open Stack

Hey folks,

I'm testing[0] out flipping our current method of consuming upstream
puppet modules from using pinned versions hosted on fuel-infra to be
able to use the ones directly from upstream (master).  This work is
primarily to be closer aligned with the other OpenStack projects as
well as switching the current way we manage Fuel into a downstream of
the upstream community version. As part of this work we have also been
working towards improving the upstream modules support different
package sets.  Specifically running Debian packages on Ubuntu[1][2].
This work is the start of being able to allow a user of Fuel to be
able to specify a specific package set and having it be able to work.
If we can properly split out the puppet modules and package
dependencies this will make Fuel a more flexible deployment engine as
I believe we would be better positioned to support multiple versions
of OpenStack for a given Fuel release.

I'm currently working to get a PoC of Fuel consuming upstream puppet
modules and the UCA packages together and documenting all of the
issues so that we can address them.  So far I have been able to deploy
the upstream modules via a custom ISO using the MOS package set and it
works locally. Unfortunately the CI seems to be hitting some issues
that I think might be related to recently merged keystone changes but
I did not run into the same problem when running a manual deployment.
As I work through this PoC, I'm also attempting to develop a small
plugin that could be used to capture the work arounds to the
deployment process. I've run into a few issues so far as I work to
switch out the package sets.

For the sake of providing additional visibility into this work, here
are the issues that I've hit so far.

The first issue I ran across is that currently the MOS repositories
contain packages for both OpenStack and other system dependencies for
creating our HA implementation.  This is problematic when we want to
switch out the OpenStack packages but still want the MOS packages for
our HA items.  I'm working around this by adding the UCA repository as
a higher priorities for deployments.  As such I've run into an issue
with the haproxy package that MOS provides vs the upstream Ubuntu
package.  To get around this, I've pinned the MOS version for now
until I can circle back around and figure out if the difference is a
config or functionality issue.

The second issue that I have run across is that we are appending
read_timeout=60 to our mysql connection strings for our
configurations. This seems to be unsupported by the libraries and
OpenStack components provided by the UCA package set.  I'm not sure
how the priority of python-pymsql vs python-mysqldb is resolved as I
had both packages installed but it continued to fail on read_timeout
being in the connection string.  For now I've updated the fuel-library
code to remove this item from the connection strings and will be
circling back around to figure out the correct 'fix' for this issue.

I'm hoping to be able to have a working ISO, plugin and a set of
instructions that can be used to deploy a basic cloud using Fuel by
the end of this week.

Thanks,
-Alex

[0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/240325/
[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/241615/
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/241741/