Open Stack

Greetings,

As some of you know, I've been working on the second phase of TripleO's
containerization effort. This phase if about migrating the docker based
deployment onto Kubernetes.

These phase requires work on several areas: Kubernetes deployment, OpenStack
deployment on Kubernetes, configuration management, etc. While I've been diving
into all of these areas, this email is about the second point, OpenStack
deployment on Kubernetes.

There are several tools we could use for this task. kolla-kubernetes,
openstack-helm, ansible roles, among others. I've looked into these tools and
I've come to the conclusion that TripleO would be better of by having ansible
roles that would allow for deploying OpenStack services on Kubernetes.

The existing solutions in the OpenStack community require using Helm. While I
like Helm and both, kolla-kubernetes and openstack-helm OpenStack projects, I
believe using any of them would add an extra layer of complexity to TripleO,
which is something the team has been fighting for years years - especially now
that the snowball is being chopped off.

Adopting any of the existing projects in the OpenStack communty would require
TripleO to also write the logic to manage those projects. For example, in the
case of openstack-helm, the TripleO team would have to write either ansible
roles or heat templates to manage - install, remove, upgrade - the charts (I'm
happy to discuss this point further but I'm keepping it at a high-level on
purpose for the sake of not writing a 10k-words-long email).

James Slagle sent an email[0], a couple of days ago, to form TripleO plans
around ansible. One take-away from this thread is that TripleO is adopting
ansible more and more, which is great and it fits perfectly with the conclusion
I reached.

Now, what this work means is that we would have to write an ansible role for
each service that will deploy the service on a Kubernetes cluster. Ideally these
roles will also generate the configuration files (removing the need of puppet
entirely) and they would manage the lifecycle. The roles would be isolated and
this will reduce the need of TripleO Heat templates. Doing this would give
TripleO full control on the deployment process too.

In addition, we could also write Ansible Playbook Bundles to contain these roles
and run them using the existing docker-cmd implementation that is coming out in
Pike (you can find a PoC/example of this in this repo[1]).

Now, I do realize the amount of work this implies and that this is my
opinion/conclusion. I'm sending this email out to kick-off the discussion and
gather thoughts and opinions from the rest of the community.

Finally, what I really like about writing pure ansible roles is that ansible is
a known, powerfull, tool that has been adopted by many operators already. It'll
provide the flexibility needed and, if structured correctly, it'll allow for
operators (and other teams) to just use the parts they need/want without
depending on the full-stack. I like the idea of being able to separate concerns
in the deployment workflow and the idea of making it simple for users of TripleO
to do the same at runtime. Unfortunately, going down this road means that my
hope of creating a field where we could collaborate even more with other
deployment tools will be a bit limited but I'm confident the result would also
be useful for others and that we all will benefit from it... My hopes might be a
bit naive *shrugs*

Flavio

[0] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-July/119405.html
[1] https://github.com/tripleo-apb/tripleo-apbs

--
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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