Open Stack

On 23/03/16 07:54, Ryan Hallisey wrote:
> *Snip*
>
>> Indeed, this has literally none of the benefits of the ideal Heat
>> deployment enumerated above save one: it may be entirely the wrong tool
>> in every way for the job it's being asked to do, but at least it is
>> still well-integrated with the rest of the infrastructure.
>
>> Now, at the Mitaka summit we discussed the idea of a 'split stack',
>> where we have one stack for the infrastructure and a separate one for
>> the software deployments, so that there is no longer any tight
>> integration between infrastructure and software. Although it makes me a
>> bit sad in some ways, I can certainly appreciate the merits of the idea
>> as well. However, from the argument above we can deduce that if this is
>> the *only* thing we do then we will end up in the very worst of all
>> possible worlds: the wrong tool for the job, poorly integrated. Every
>> single advantage of using Heat to deploy software will have evaporated,
>> leaving only disadvantages.
>
> I think Heat is a very powerful tool having done the container integration
> into the tripleo-heat-templates I can see its appeal.  Something I learned
> from integration, was that Heat is not the best tool for container deployment,
> at least right now.  We were able to leverage the work in Kolla, but what it
> came down to was that we're not using containers or Kolla to its max potential.
>
> I did an evaluation recently of tripleo and kolla to see what we would gain
> if the two were to combine. Let's look at some items on tripleo's roadmap.
> Split stack, as mentioned above, would be gained if tripleo were to adopt
> Kolla.  Tripleo holds the undercloud and ironic.  Kolla separates config
> and deployment.  Therefore, allowing for the decoupling for each piece of
> the stack.  Composable roles, this would be the ability to land services
> onto separate hosts on demand.  Kolla also already does this [1]. Finally,
> container integration, this is just a given :).
>
> In the near term, if tripleo were to adopt Kolla as its overcloud it would
> be provided these features and retire heat to setting up the baremetal nodes
> and providing those ips to ansible.  This would be great for kolla too because
> it would provide baremetal provisioning.
>
> Ian Main and I are currently working on a POC for this as of last week [2].
> It's just a simple heat template :).
>
> I think further down the road we can evaluate using kubernetes [3].
> For now though,  kolla-anisble is rock solid and is worth using for the
> overcloud.

My concern about kolla-ansible is that the requirements might start 
getting away from what the original design was intended to cope with, 
and that it may prove difficult to extend. For example, I wrote about 
the idea of doing the container deployments with pure Heat:

>> What's more, we are going to need some way of redistributing services when a machine in the cluster fails, and ultimately we would like that process to be automated, which would *require* a template generation service.
>>
>> We certainly *could* build all of that. But we definitely shouldn't

and to my mind kolla-ansible is in a similar category in that respect 
(it does, of course, have an existing community and in that sense is 
still strictly superior to the pure-Heat approach). There's lots of 
stuff in e.g. Kubernetes that it seems likely we'll want and, while 
there's no _theoretical_ obstacle to implementing them in Ansible, these 
are hard, subtle problems which are presumably better left to a 
specialist project.

I'd be happy to hear other opinions on that though. Maybe we don't care 
about any of that container cluster management stuff, and if something 
fails we just let everything run degraded until we can pull in a 
replacement? I don't know.

cheers,
Zane.