Open Stack

Background info:

We've got a problem in TripleO at the moment where many of our
workflows can be driven by the command line only. This causes some
problems for those trying to build a UI around the workflows in that
they have to duplicate deployment logic in potentially multiple places.
There are specs up for review which outline how we might solve this
problem by building what is called TripleO API [1].

Late last year I began experimenting with an OpenStack service called
Mistral which contains a generic workflow API. Mistral supports
defining workflows in YAML and then creating, managing, and executing
them via an OpenStack API. Initially the effort was focused around the
idea of creating a workflow in Mistral which could supplant our
"baremetal introspection" workflow which currently lives in python-
tripleoclient. I create a video presentation which outlines this effort
[2]. This particular workflow seemed to fit nicely within the Mistral
tooling.

----

More recently I've turned my attention to what it might look like if we
were to use Mistral as a replacement for the TripleO API entirely. This
brings forth the question of would TripleO be better off building out
its own API... or would relying on existing OpenStack APIs be a better
solution?

Some things I like about the Mistral solution:

- The API already exists and is generic.

- Mistral already supports interacting with many of the OpenStack API's
we require [3]. Integration with keystone is baked in. Adding support
for new clients seems straightforward (I've had no issues in adding
support for ironic, inspector, and swift actions).

- Mistral actions are pluggable. We could fairly easily wrap some of
our more complex workflows (perhaps those that aren't easy to replicate
with pure YAML workflows) by creating our own TripleO Mistral actions.
This approach would be similar to creating a custom Heat resource...
something we have avoided with Heat in TripleO but I think it is
perhaps more reasonable with Mistral and would allow us to again build
out our YAML workflows to drive things. This might allow us to build
off some of the tripleo-common consolidation that is already underway
...

- We could achieve a "stable API" by simply maintaining input
parameters for workflows in a stable manner. Or perhaps workflows get
versioned like a normal API would be as well.

- The purist part of me likes Mistral quite a bit. It fits nicely with
the deploy OpenStack with OpenStack. I sort of feel like if we have to
build our own API in TripleO part of this vision has failed and could
even be seen as a massive technical debt which would likely be hard to
build a community around outside of TripleO.

- Some of the proposed validations could perhaps be implemented as new
Mistral actions as well. I'm not convinced we require TripleO API just
to support a validations mechanism yet. Perhaps validations seem hard
because we are simply trying to do them in the wrong places anyway?
(like for example perhaps we should validate network connectivity at
inspection time rather than during provisioning).

- Power users might find a workflow built around a Mistral API more
easy to interact with and expand upon. Perhaps this ends up being
something that gets submitted as a patchset back to the TripleO that we
accept into our upstream "stock" workflow sets.

----

Last week we landed the last patches [4] to our undercloud to enable
installing Mistral by simply setting: enable_mistral = true in
undercloud.conf. NOTE: you'll need to be using a recent trunk repo from
Delorean so that you have the recently added Mistral packages for this
to work. Although the feature is disable by default this should enable
those wishing to tinker with Mistral as a new TripleO undercloud
service an easy path forwards.

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/230432
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnAT37O-sdw
[3] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/mistral/tree/mistral/action
s/openstack/mapping.json
[4] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/tripleo-undercloud-workflow