Hi Dave,

I have been hesitating to reply to your mailing list post because it doesn't feel right to pitch two community tools against each other here on the mailing list - so i won't do that here.

I would say that the deployment tool is a means to an end. So you should look at the technology choices, upgrade paths, support for "day 2 operations", how bugs get addressed, documentation, operator experience etc etc. Only you can decide which is appropriate for the constraints and requirements of your deployment.

My reply will obviously be biassed, as I am a big contributor to openstack-ansible. My observation is that the operators that gain the most out of any of these tools are the ones who engage with the community around those tools, primarily in the case of openstack-ansible that would be through our IRC channel, weekly meetings and bug reports on Launchpad. You will gain insight and be able to leverage the knowledge of other operators who in some cases have literally written the book on various aspects of OpenStack. Trying to fight though every decision or problem on your own is the worst way to approach using any of these community driven tools.

If you instead want a more "shrink wrap" approach to an installer, or more formal support, then it would be wise to look at the product oriented offerings from the large vendors.

Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible will expect you to make a good number of decisions about the specifics of your deployment, for example storage, networking and security concerns. Both would also expect you to gain sufficient knowledge about how OpenStack itself works to be able to make good use of the customization opportunities that both provide. This is really the unique selling point of the community tooling, you get a very high degree of customization potential but that can come at the cost of some complexity.

As you are already using openstack-ansible I would suggest that you continue, but as I've already said I have an existing interest here and I really don't want to start a tooling debate. Join us in IRC in #openstack-ansible and discuss any pain points you have. This way we can hopefully help you out, or address specific issues in the code - you may have discovered legitimate bugs or a use case that is not straightforward to fulfill. This is how all of the community tools get improved and evolved over time.

On one specific point I would recommend that you move entirely to Debian 11 as Xena will be the last release that openstack-ansible supports Buster.

I'm not sure there is a fool-proof installer really. Installing the code is one thing, being effective though upgrades and applying bugfixes to a production environment is a different and a more important concern in the long term. Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible offer "all-in-one" deployments which are intended as "should-just-work" demonstrators of how things fit together and for lightweight testing. Scaling those out to larger deployments is where the real work is, and neither tool sets out to be particularly prescriptive about some parts of how you build your environment.

Hopefully this is helpful, Jonathan.

On 09/06/2022 15:58, Dave Hall wrote:

Hello,

My question is about OpenStack-Ansible vs. Kolla-Ansible. While I am sensitive to the effort that has been put into both of these projects, what I really need right now is the most fool-proof way to deploy and manage a small production cluster for academic instructional use.

(BTW, I do understand that there are other differences between Kolla and regular openstack.)

I have been working for a couple months with OpenStack-Ansible to deploy a small (3-node) Xena test cluster on VirtualBox VMs in preparation for a larger deployment on real hardware - 6 to 10 nodes.  My VirtualBox deployment has been:

Debian 11 deployment, Debian 10 infra, compute, and storage nodes

It has been slow going, at least partially due to some issues and limitations with VirtualBox (and Vagrant early on).  However, deploying a test cluster on VMs still seems preferable to just diving into deployment on real hardware and going through multiple scrubs/reinstalls.

I've recently seen more posts in the list about Kolla-Ansible. So, as a 'beginner', should I shift and look at Kolla-Ansible, or should I stay the course and continue with Openstack-Ansible? What are the pros and cons of each?

For that matter, is there some other deployment mechanism that would be more fool-proof for a first-timer?  Although I'm more familiar with Ansible than the other tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) I'm most interested in how to get a cluster up and running regardless of the underlying tools.

Thanks.

-Dave

-- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu

For the sake of figuring out your options, I would also look at what features do you actually require at the Openstack level.

I would start with the following questions to identify gaps or advantages between the two tools.

- What Openstack projects do you require beyond the basic services? - Manilla, Trove, Skydive, Octavia, Ceilometer? - What network topologies are you looking to support? - OVS, OVN, SRIOV? - What support model are you looking for? - Using community deployers means you wear many different hats. Don't get me wrong, support through IRC and mailing lists is great but it's a community effort. If this breaks at 2AM, you will be mostly on your own. - Canonical can offer a Juju based deployment for Openstack with commercial support. - RedHat offers RHOSP that is based around tripleo with commercial support. - Are you expecting to configure CEPH through your deployer? - Are there any specific tech you are already familiar with in either tool?

I am actually working on some deep dive into kolla-ansible and ansible-openstack for $work but I am a bit early in that process.

In the end, like Jonathan mentioned, they both are a means to an end.

That said, it is fair to say that having two different tools that essentially serve the same purpose is a strange position to be in. But I guess that comes with the flexibility of opensource!

On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 2:07 PM Dave Hall kdhall@binghamton.edu wrote:

Jonathan,

Thank you for replying. I want to stress that I also understand that both Openstack-Ansible and Kolla-Ansible are serious projects and that I would not try to play one against the other. I do perceive that although both use Ansible, both also take different approaches in their organization and configuration.

My query was whether one might be easier for beginners to grok whereas the other might be the tool of choice for the enlightened ones. Or perhaps it's just that Kolla uses Docker instead of LXC.

It's just a lot to learn either way - this is big software.

Regarding Openstack-Ansible, I will check out the IRC, although last I knew the University was blocking all IRC.

I will also ask more questions here.

Thanks.

-Dave

-- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu

On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 11:35 AM Jonathan Rosser < jonathan.rosser@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:

...

Hi Dave,

I have been hesitating to reply to your mailing list post because it doesn't feel right to pitch two community tools against each other here on the mailing list - so i won't do that here.

I would say that the deployment tool is a means to an end. So you should look at the technology choices, upgrade paths, support for "day 2 operations", how bugs get addressed, documentation, operator experience etc etc. Only you can decide which is appropriate for the constraints and requirements of your deployment. My reply will obviously be biassed, as I am a big contributor to openstack-ansible. My observation is that the operators that gain the most out of any of these tools are the ones who engage with the community around those tools, primarily in the case of openstack-ansible that would be through our IRC channel, weekly meetings and bug reports on Launchpad. You will gain insight and be able to leverage the knowledge of other operators who in some cases have literally written the book on various aspects of OpenStack. Trying to fight though every decision or problem on your own is the worst way to approach using any of these community driven tools.

If you instead want a more "shrink wrap" approach to an installer, or more formal support, then it would be wise to look at the product oriented offerings from the large vendors.

Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible will expect you to make a good number of decisions about the specifics of your deployment, for example storage, networking and security concerns. Both would also expect you to gain sufficient knowledge about how OpenStack itself works to be able to make good use of the customization opportunities that both provide. This is really the unique selling point of the community tooling, you get a very high degree of customization potential but that can come at the cost of some complexity.

As you are already using openstack-ansible I would suggest that you continue, but as I've already said I have an existing interest here and I really don't want to start a tooling debate. Join us in IRC in #openstack-ansible and discuss any pain points you have. This way we can hopefully help you out, or address specific issues in the code - you may have discovered legitimate bugs or a use case that is not straightforward to fulfill. This is how all of the community tools get improved and evolved over time.

On one specific point I would recommend that you move entirely to Debian 11 as Xena will be the last release that openstack-ansible supports Buster.

I'm not sure there is a fool-proof installer really. Installing the code is one thing, being effective though upgrades and applying bugfixes to a production environment is a different and a more important concern in the long term. Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible offer "all-in-one" deployments which are intended as "should-just-work" demonstrators of how things fit together and for lightweight testing. Scaling those out to larger deployments is where the real work is, and neither tool sets out to be particularly prescriptive about some parts of how you build your environment.

Hopefully this is helpful, Jonathan.

On 09/06/2022 15:58, Dave Hall wrote:

Hello,

My question is about OpenStack-Ansible vs. Kolla-Ansible. While I am sensitive to the effort that has been put into both of these projects, what I really need right now is the most fool-proof way to deploy and manage a small production cluster for academic instructional use.

(BTW, I do understand that there are other differences between Kolla and regular openstack.)

I have been working for a couple months with OpenStack-Ansible to deploy a small (3-node) Xena test cluster on VirtualBox VMs in preparation for a larger deployment on real hardware - 6 to 10 nodes. My VirtualBox deployment has been:

Debian 11 deployment, Debian 10 infra, compute, and storage nodes

It has been slow going, at least partially due to some issues and limitations with VirtualBox (and Vagrant early on). However, deploying a test cluster on VMs still seems preferable to just diving into deployment on real hardware and going through multiple scrubs/reinstalls.

I've recently seen more posts in the list about Kolla-Ansible. So, as a 'beginner', should I shift and look at Kolla-Ansible, or should I stay the course and continue with Openstack-Ansible? What are the pros and cons of each?

For that matter, is there some other deployment mechanism that would be more fool-proof for a first-timer? Although I'm more familiar with Ansible than the other tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) I'm most interested in how to get a cluster up and running regardless of the underlying tools.

Thanks.

-Dave

-- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu

On 2022-06-09 14:03:47 -0400 (-0400), Dave Hall wrote: [...]

I will check out the IRC, although last I knew the University was blocking all IRC.

[...]

If you're able to reach Matrix, you can participate quite effectively in OFTC's IRC channels through their Matrix bridge. A concise writeup can be found here:

https://blog.christophersmart.com/2022/03/21/joining-a-bridged-irc-network-o...

This has been discussed before, but it would be nice if we as a community had an easier way to answer this question. I know many of us feel conflicted about aggressively promoting our own projects over alternatives, but also want to give them a fair chance. Maybe each project needs a "why pick me" page that could be linked to in a standard response.

Mark

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 16:40, Jonathan Rosser jonathan.rosser@rd.bbc.co.uk wrote:

Hi Dave,

I have been hesitating to reply to your mailing list post because it doesn't feel right to pitch two community tools against each other here on the mailing list - so i won't do that here.

I would say that the deployment tool is a means to an end. So you should look at the technology choices, upgrade paths, support for "day 2 operations", how bugs get addressed, documentation, operator experience etc etc. Only you can decide which is appropriate for the constraints and requirements of your deployment. My reply will obviously be biassed, as I am a big contributor to openstack-ansible. My observation is that the operators that gain the most out of any of these tools are the ones who engage with the community around those tools, primarily in the case of openstack-ansible that would be through our IRC channel, weekly meetings and bug reports on Launchpad. You will gain insight and be able to leverage the knowledge of other operators who in some cases have literally written the book on various aspects of OpenStack. Trying to fight though every decision or problem on your own is the worst way to approach using any of these community driven tools.

If you instead want a more "shrink wrap" approach to an installer, or more formal support, then it would be wise to look at the product oriented offerings from the large vendors.

Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible will expect you to make a good number of decisions about the specifics of your deployment, for example storage, networking and security concerns. Both would also expect you to gain sufficient knowledge about how OpenStack itself works to be able to make good use of the customization opportunities that both provide. This is really the unique selling point of the community tooling, you get a very high degree of customization potential but that can come at the cost of some complexity.

As you are already using openstack-ansible I would suggest that you continue, but as I've already said I have an existing interest here and I really don't want to start a tooling debate. Join us in IRC in #openstack-ansible and discuss any pain points you have. This way we can hopefully help you out, or address specific issues in the code - you may have discovered legitimate bugs or a use case that is not straightforward to fulfill. This is how all of the community tools get improved and evolved over time.

On one specific point I would recommend that you move entirely to Debian 11 as Xena will be the last release that openstack-ansible supports Buster.

I'm not sure there is a fool-proof installer really. Installing the code is one thing, being effective though upgrades and applying bugfixes to a production environment is a different and a more important concern in the long term. Both openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible offer "all-in-one" deployments which are intended as "should-just-work" demonstrators of how things fit together and for lightweight testing. Scaling those out to larger deployments is where the real work is, and neither tool sets out to be particularly prescriptive about some parts of how you build your environment.

Hopefully this is helpful, Jonathan.

On 09/06/2022 15:58, Dave Hall wrote:

Hello,

My question is about OpenStack-Ansible vs. Kolla-Ansible. While I am sensitive to the effort that has been put into both of these projects, what I really need right now is the most fool-proof way to deploy and manage a small production cluster for academic instructional use.

(BTW, I do understand that there are other differences between Kolla and regular openstack.)

I have been working for a couple months with OpenStack-Ansible to deploy a small (3-node) Xena test cluster on VirtualBox VMs in preparation for a larger deployment on real hardware - 6 to 10 nodes. My VirtualBox deployment has been:

Debian 11 deployment, Debian 10 infra, compute, and storage nodes

It has been slow going, at least partially due to some issues and limitations with VirtualBox (and Vagrant early on). However, deploying a test cluster on VMs still seems preferable to just diving into deployment on real hardware and going through multiple scrubs/reinstalls.

I've recently seen more posts in the list about Kolla-Ansible. So, as a 'beginner', should I shift and look at Kolla-Ansible, or should I stay the course and continue with Openstack-Ansible? What are the pros and cons of each?

For that matter, is there some other deployment mechanism that would be more fool-proof for a first-timer? Although I'm more familiar with Ansible than the other tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) I'm most interested in how to get a cluster up and running regardless of the underlying tools.

Thanks.

-Dave

-- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu

Hi Dave,

I would suggest getting a minimal deployment up and running with each environment, before making your choice.

For Kolla Ansible, you can follow the quickstart documentation to get a single node deployment up and running: https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/yoga/user/quickstart.html

If you also need bare metal provisioning capabilities for your control & compute nodes, as well as more advanced host configuration, you might consider Kayobe, which builds on top of Kolla Ansible. Here is a guide to building up the configuration for a single node deployment: https://docs.openstack.org/kayobe/latest/configuration/scenarios/all-in-one/...

Regards, Mark

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 16:05, Dave Hall kdhall@binghamton.edu wrote:

Hello,

My question is about OpenStack-Ansible vs. Kolla-Ansible. While I am sensitive to the effort that has been put into both of these projects, what I really need right now is the most fool-proof way to deploy and manage a small production cluster for academic instructional use.

(BTW, I do understand that there are other differences between Kolla and regular openstack.)

I have been working for a couple months with OpenStack-Ansible to deploy a small (3-node) Xena test cluster on VirtualBox VMs in preparation for a larger deployment on real hardware - 6 to 10 nodes. My VirtualBox deployment has been:

Debian 11 deployment, Debian 10 infra, compute, and storage nodes

It has been slow going, at least partially due to some issues and limitations with VirtualBox (and Vagrant early on). However, deploying a test cluster on VMs still seems preferable to just diving into deployment on real hardware and going through multiple scrubs/reinstalls.

I've recently seen more posts in the list about Kolla-Ansible. So, as a 'beginner', should I shift and look at Kolla-Ansible, or should I stay the course and continue with Openstack-Ansible? What are the pros and cons of each?

For that matter, is there some other deployment mechanism that would be more fool-proof for a first-timer? Although I'm more familiar with Ansible than the other tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) I'm most interested in how to get a cluster up and running regardless of the underlying tools.

Thanks.

-Dave

-- Dave Hall Binghamton University kdhall@binghamton.edu