[Openstack-operators] Moving from distro packages to containers (or virtualenvs...)

Nick Jones nick.jones at datacentred.co.uk
Thu May 12 22:19:59 UTC 2016


Hi.

> I am investigating how to help move godaddy from rpms to a container-like solution (virtualenvs, lxc, or docker...) and a set of questions that comes up is the following (and I would think that some folks on this mailing list may have some useful insight into the answers):

I’ve been mulling this over for a while as well, and although we’re not yet there I figured I might as well chip in with my .2p all the same.

> * Have you done the transition?

Not yet!

> * Was/is kolla used or looked into? or something custom?

We’re looking at deploying Docker containers from images that have been created using Puppet.  We’d also use Puppet to manage the orchestration, i.e to make sure a given container is running in the right place and using the correct image ID.  Containers would comprise discrete OpenStack service ‘composables’, i.e a container on a control node running the core nova services (nova-api, nova-scheduler, nova-compute, and so on), one running neutron-server, one for keystone, etc.  Nothing unusual there.

The workflow would be something like:

1. Developer generates / updates configuration via Puppet and builds a new image;
2. Image is uploaded into a private Docker image registry.  Puppet handles deploying a container from this new image ID;
3. New container is deployed into a staging environment for testing;
4. Assuming everything checks out, Puppet again handles deploying an updated container into the production environment on the relevant hosts.

I’m simplifying things a little but essentially that’s how I see this hanging together.

> * What was the roll-out strategy to achieve the final container solution?

We’d do this piecemeal, and so containerise some of the ‘safer’ components first of all (such as Horizon) to make sure this all hangs together.  Eventually we’d have all of our core OpenStack services on the control nodes isolated and running in containers, and then work on this approach for the rest of the platform.

Would love to hear from other operators as well as to their experience and conclusions.

— 

-Nick
-- 
DataCentred Limited registered in England and Wales no. 05611763



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