Hi,
This is a summary of the ad-hoc cross project session between the OpenStack Ansible and Kolla teams.
It occurred to me that our two teams likely face similar challenges, and there are areas we could collaborate on. I've tagged TripleO also since the same applies there.
[Collaboration on approach to features] This was my main reason for proposing the session - there are features and changes that all deployment tools need to make. Examples coming up include support for upgrade checkers and IPv6. Rather than work in isolation and solve the same problem in different ways, perhaps we could share our experiences. The implementations will differ, but providing a reasonably consistent feel between deployment tools can't be a bad thing.
As a test case, we briefly discussed our experience with the upgrade checker support added in Stein, and found that our expectation of how it would work was fairly aligned in the room, but not aligned with how I understand it to actually work (it's more of a post-upgrade check than a pre-upgrade check).
I was also able to point the OSA team at the placement migration code added to Kolla in the Stein release, which should save them some time, and provide more eyes on our code.
I'd like to pursue this more collaborative approach during the Train release where it fits. Upgrade checkers seems a good place to start, but am open to other ideas such as IPv6 or Python 3.
[OSA in Kayobe] This was my wildcard - add support for deploying OpenStack via OSA in Kayobe as an alternative to Kolla Ansible. It could be a good fit for those users who want to use OSA but don't have a provisioning system. This wasn't true of anyone in the room, and lack of resources deters from 'build it and they will come'. Still, the seed is planted, it may yet grow.
[Sharing Ansible roles] mnaser had an interesting idea: add support for deploying kolla containers to the OSA Ansible service roles. We could then use those roles within Kolla Ansible to avoid duplication of code. There is definitely some appeal to this in theory. In practice however I feel that the two deployment models are sufficiently different that it would add significantly complexity to both projects. Part of the (relative) simplicity and regularity of Kolla Ansible is enabled by handing off installation and other tasks to Kolla.
One option that might work however is sharing some of the lower level building blocks. mnaser offered to make a PoC for using https://github.com/openstack/ansible-config_template to generate configuration in Kolla Ansible in place of merge_config and merge_yaml. It requires some changes to that role to support merging a list of source template files. We'd also need to add an external dependency to our 'monorepo', or 'vendor' the module - trade offs to make in complexity vs. maintaining our own module.
I'd like to thank the OSA team for hosting the discussion - it was great to meet the team and share experience.
Cheers, Mark