Open Stack

The HA Guide Team has been meeting weekly [1] for the last few months to
plan and implement improvements to the OpenStack High Availability Guide
[2]. We started with a push to identify current content bugs. While this
was helpful to improve the content in the short term, we felt that larger
structural changes were needed. A blueprint for this work is at [3].

This will be an HA Installation Guide; information about how to manage an
existing HA environment (such as how to recover from a failed component) is
beyond the scope of this project. The strategic assumptions are:

1. We assume that users have already built at least a "learning" OpenStack
environment following the information in the Install Guide before they
attempt to set up an HA environment. The HA Guide should be targeted at
users who have some experience installing OpenStack.

2. The HA Guide should be structured to parallel the Install Guide as much
as possible. This means that the installation information will be
structured sequentially, around the OpenStack components rather than HA
strategies (active/passive vs active/active). The high-level flow is:
- HA Intro and Concepts
- Hardware setup
- Infrastructure prerequisites that we assume are in place before starting
an HA deployment or upgrade
- HA networking -- Neutron only (very high-level with handoff to Networking
Guide)
- HA configuration for Controller services
- HA configuration for Storage services, including brief discussion of the
advantages of Ceph and a handoff to Ceph documentation for configuration
details
- HA configuration for Compute node services
- Other HA configuration (Ceilometer/MongoDB, Heat, Trove)

3. The HA Guide should heavily reference the Install Guide and will then
supplement that information. For example, "Install and configure the xx
component following the instructions in the Install Guide, then do these
additional configurations." This will minimize content duplication.

4. Similarly, we expect that the Networking Guide will handle
high-availability networking configuration and the HA Guide will reference
that material.

5. The HA Guide should emphasize a reasonable, standard deployment based on
open source components. We can provide some notes about alternatives as
appropriate (for example, using a commercial load balancer might be a
better alternative than relying on HAProxy).

6. In general, the HA Guide should only cover core OpenStack services.
Other projects (such as Sahara and Murano) should cover HA configurations
in their documentation.

7. The HA guide should cover all appropriate Linux distros/platforms.

8. We will reuse as much of the material in the existing HA Guide as
possible, with revisions to augment and update the information. The revised
document will be written in RST; existing content will be converted as it
is added to the new document.

9. Some attempt will be made to incorporate material for both the Juno and
Kilo releases, identifying configurations, etc that are different for these
releases.

We think this restructure will offer readers a more logical flow between an
initial install and adopting high availability components for an OpenStack
cloud. Additionally, it should reduce the content maintenance burden of the
Docs team in general by reducing duplication. We’ve prepared a draft table
of contents for the HA Guide restructure [4] along with starting notes for
included content.

We welcome your comments and suggestions so please reply. We also welcome
your contributions. We’re securing support from Mirantis, Percona,
Rackspace, and independent OpenStack contributors like CloudDon, but more
hands are always welcome. Refer to our team wiki page for information about
our weekly 30 minute meetings.

Best,
The HA Guide Team

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/HA_Guide_Update
[2] http://docs.openstack.org/high-availability-guide/content/
[3]
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-manuals/+spec/improve-ha-guide
[4] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HAGuideImprovements/TOC



---
Matt Griffin
Director of Product Management
Percona
irc: mattgriffin
skype: thebear78
m: 1-214-727-4100
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