Open Stack

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018, at 1:41 AM, Gema Gomez wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Linaro would like to add a new cloud to infra so that we can run tests
> on ARM64 going forward. This discussion has been ongoing for the good
> part of a year, apologies that it took us so long to get to a point
> where we feel comfortable going ahead in terms of stability of
> infrastructure and functionality.
> 
> My team has been taking care of making OpenStack as multiarch as
> possible and making the experience of using an ARM64 cloud as close to
> using a traditional amd64 one as possible. We have the Linaro Developer
> Cloud program, which consists of a set of clouds that run on ARM64
> hardware donated by the Linaro Enterprise Group members[1] and dedicated
> to enablement/testing of upstream projects. Until recently our clouds
> were run by an engineering team and were used to do enablement of
> different projects and bug fixes of OpenStack, now we have a dedicated
> admin and we are ready to take it a step forward. The clouds are
> currently running OpenStack Newton but we are going to be moving to
> Queens as soon as the release is out. Kolla has volunteered to be the
> first project for this experiment, they have been pushing us to start
> doing CI on our images so they also feel more comfortable accepting our
> changes. We will welcome any other project that wants to be part of this
> experiment, but we'll focus our engineering efforts initially on
> enabling Kolla CI.
> 
> After some preliminary discussion with fungi and inc0, we are going to
> start small and grow from there. The initial plan is to add 2 projects:
> 
> 1. Control-plane project that will host a nodepool builder with 8 vCPUs,
> 8 GB RAM, 1TB storage on a Cinder volume for the image building scratch
> space. A cache server with similar specs + 200GB on a cinder volume for
> AFS and Apache proxy caches. They will have a routable IP address.
> 
> 2. Jobs project, we'll have capacity for 6 test instances initially and
> after initial assessment grow it as required (8 vCPUs/8 GB RAM, 80GB
> storage, 1 routable IP each).
> 
> Is there anything else we are missing for the initial trial? Any
> questions/concerns before we start? I will try to have presence on the
> infra weekly calls/IRC channel or have someone from my team on them
> going forward.

This plan looks good to me. The one question I had on IRC (and putting it here for historical reasons) is whether or not Andrew FileSystem (AFS) will build and run on arm64. OpenAFS is not in the linux kernel tree so this may not work. The good news is mtreinish reports that after a quick test on some of his hardware AFS was working.

> 
> In practical terms, once we've created the resources, is there a guide
> to getting the infra bits in place for it? Who to give the credentials
> to/etc?

New clouds happen infrequently enough and require a reasonable amount of communication to get going so I don't think we have written down a guide beyond what we have on the donating resources page [2].

Typically what happens is we'll have an infra root act as the contact point to set things up, you'll provide them with credentials via email (or whatever communication system is most convenient) then they will immediately change the password(s). It is also helpful if we can get a contact individual for the cloud side and we'll record that in our passwords file so that any one of our infra roots knows who to talk to should the need arise.

Once the initial credential exchange happens the next step is for that infra root to double check quotas and get the mirror host up and running as well as image builder (and images) built. Once that is done you should be ready to push changes to projects that add jobs using the new nodepool labels (something like ubuntu-xenial-arm64).
> 
> Thanks!
> Gema

Thank you! this is exciting.

> 
> [1] https://www.linaro.org/groups/leg/
[2] https://docs.openstack.org/infra/system-config/contribute-cloud.html

Clark