Open Stack

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 01:00:54PM -0500, Jay Pipes wrote:
> On 12/11/2012 12:04 PM, Martyn Taylor wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > After a meeting in Brno a few weeks back I met up with a fellow
> > RedHat colleague Steven Hardy, who is working on a project called
> > Heat (an OpenStack incubator project).  After watching his
> > presentation on OpenStack and then later his talk about Heat at the
> > EMEA OpenStack day we got chatting, and the subject of Image
> > Building in OpenStack came up.
> > 
> > The project I currently work on, "Aeolus" has a suite of tools for
> > managing federated clouds.  One of the tools we've created is called
> > Imagefactory and is designed specifically to allow automated
> > building, converting and uploading of images to a number of Cloud
> > providers.  We decided it would be worthwhile to get together and
> > try to integrate the two projects, since Imagefactory had recently
> > gained a provider plugin for OpenStack.
> > 
> > The result of this experiment is a proof of concept that we pulled
> > together in a few days.  We put together a video that demo's the
> > thing in action.  You can view it here (it's only around 6mins).
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdBM4HA3QUk
> 
> Very, very nice, Martyn!
> 
> > We'd be interested to see what other users think of this.  We aim to
> > create a horizon plugin that should be easily included in existing
> > OpenStack installations.  We'd love to get feedback from you guys.
> 
> Yes, yes, yes. Can't wait to see the code! :)

Code is already available :)
Imagefactory:
https://github.com/aeolusproject/imagefactory
http://imgfac.org/

Note I made a few changes, pull-request pending, but you can pull my fork:
https://github.com/aeolusproject/imagefactory/pull/182
https://github.com/hardys/imagefactory/tree/sh_glance_plugin

Martyn's changes to the Horizon UI are available in his github fork (as he
mentioned, a plugin would be better, and is TODO):
https://github.com/mtaylor/horizon

Martyn has some HOWTO notes:
https://github.com/mtaylor/horizon/tree/master/imagefactory-setup

> 
> > Is this something you would find useful?
> > Can you envisage this fitting into your current processes?
> 
> Absolutely.
> 
> > Hopefully this can provide a starting point to discuss image-building
> > requirements for OpenStack, which will provide valuable input to the
> > Imagefactory team, who are interested in adding further, more scalable
> > support for OpenStack to Imagefactory
> 
> What are the current scalability limitations you are experiencing?
> Perhaps I can contribute some work there...

So the main limitation, is imagefactory uses Oz under the hood to build the
image, which uses libvirt directly to boot the image & run the installer.

Obviously for a fully scalable solution you'd want to be able to run image
build jobs on multiple hypervisor nodes.  Some discussions indicate it may
be worthwhile exploring doing this via Nova, although I've not yet looked
into exactly how this could be done (bootstrap the installer via
boot-from-volume or baremetal-install methods?)

Anyway, for now it's a pretty cool demo of the sort of functionality it
would be nice to have in openstack :)

Steve