Open Stack

(D) and a half (I'm more of a "OMG puppies!" man, myself). Clear, focused, and actionable. I really like this and think there's tons of value beyond just implementing an OpenStack native template language. Hopefully we can wrangle the different efforts around the native template language by next weeks meeting. 

In any case, Zane, do you think it would be a good idea to submit your action items as separate blueprints or include them under the Native DSL one? In either case, this sounds like an excellent proposal to me, and I'd totally throw my name in to help implement it.

On Apr 25, 2013, at 2:35 PM, Zane Bitter wrote:

> Greetings Heaters,
> I'm hearing a lot about (and struggling to keep track of) multiple people working on competing proposals for how a Heat template language should look if we designed it from scratch and, while that's valuable in helping to figure out the primitives we need, I'd also like to approach it from the other direction and start figuring out what path we need to get on to bring the new feature direction that our users want to fruition. We all agreed at the Summit that we need to pursue these new features in an incremental manner, and we should not forget *why*:
> 
>   A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
>   from a simple system that worked.
>                     -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall's_law
> 
> What follows is a concrete proposal for how we could implement one of the requested features, starting from use cases, through the predicted code changes required and looping back around to user benefits. It certainly does not purport to implement every feature requested by users. It is likely wrong in the particulars, certainly in ways that will not be discovered at least until we have implemented it. But it is a concrete proposal. It begins with an excellent summary of the use case from Adrian...
> 
> 
> On 13/04/13 00:36, Adrian Otto wrote:
> > Goal: Deploy my app on my chosen OpenStack based public cloud, using Heat for Dev/Test. For Production, deploy to my private OpenStack cloud.
> >
> > Scenario: My app depends on a MySQL database. My public cloud provider has a hosted "mysql" service that is offered through a Provider plug-in. It's there automatically because my cloud hosting company put it there.  I deploy, and finish my testing on the public cloud. I want to go to production now.
> >
> > Solution: The Provider gives you a way to abstract the different cloud implementations. I establish an equivalent Provider on my private OpenStack cloud using RedDwarf. I set up a Provider that offers "mysql" in my private cloud. Now the same setup works on both clouds, even though the API for my local "mysql" service may actually differ from the database provisioning API in the public cloud. Now I deploy on my "production" Environment in my private cloud, and it works!
> 
> So, the first and most important thing to note is that this is exactly how Heat works _now_.
> 
> There is a resource type called AWS::RDS::DBInstance and the operator of your cloud can choose a plugin to implement that interface. The plugin shipping with Heat actually just spins up a somewhat hacky Heat stack running MySQL... in future we hope to ship a RedDwarf Lite plugin, and of course any cloud provider with their own DBaaS could easily write a plugin to interface with that. (Note that when we do see a RedDwarf Lite plugin we'll probably also see a variant called something like OS::RedDwarf::DBInstance with more OpenStack-specific properties &c.)
> 
> So that's how Heat works today. How can we make this better? Well, one thing obviously sucks: your cloud operator, and not you, gets to decide which plugin is used. That sorta makes sense when it's an interface to an XaaS thing in their cloud, but if it's just a Nova instance running MySQL and you don't like the version your operator has gone with, you are SOL. You can try running your own Heat engine, but you're probably going to have to really hack at it first because whenever anything in-guest has to talk back to you, the endpoint is obtained from the same Keystone catalog that you're using to talk to the other services. And no cloud operator in the world - not even your friendly local IT department - is going to let users upload Python code to run in-memory in their orchestration engine along with all of the other users' code.
> 
> If only there were some sort of language for defining OpenStack services that could be safely executed by users...
> 
> Of course that's exactly what we're all about on this project :). So my proposal is to allow users to define their own resource types using a Heat template. Heat would know to use this template instead of a built-in type from a "Provider" member in the Resource definition that contains a URL to the template. (I'm appropriating the name "Provider" from Rackspace's DSL proposal for now because inventing new names for things that already exist is a sucker's game.)
> 
> These are the tasks that come to mind that would be required to implement this (each of these bullet points could become a blueprint):
> 
> * Create a Custom resource type that is based on a nested stack but, unlike the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack type, has properties and attributes inferred from the parameters and outputs (respectively) of the template provided.
> * Allow JSON values for parameters.
> * Introduce the concept of _stack_ Metadata, and provide a way to access it in a template (pseudo-parameter?).
> * Modify resource instantiation to create a Custom resource whenever a resource has a non-empty "Provider" attribute.
> * Introduce a schema for attributes (i.e. allowed arguments to Fn::GetAttr) [desirable anyway for autogenerating documentation]
> * Add an API to get a generic template version of any built-in resource (with all properties/outputs defined) that can be easily customised to make a new provider template.
> 
> A possible avenue for increasing flexibility:
> * Add support for more template functions that manipulate the template directly:
>  - Array/dictionary (uh, object) lookup
>  - more string functions?
>  - maybe conditionals?
>  - definitely NOT loops/map.
> 
> What might all of this give us?
> + Users are no longer dependent on the operator to provide the resource type they need (perhaps for cross-cloud compatibility), but can supply their own.
> + Users can effectively subclass built-in types. For example, you could create a Puppet Instance template that configures an instance as a Puppet slave, then selectively use that in place of a regular instance and just pass the metadata to specialise it.
> + Users can share their provider templates: as soon as a second person is trying to configure a puppet slave in a template we're wasting an opportunity - this will enable work like that to be shared.
> + This is infinitely flexible at the platform layer - anybody (Puppet, Chef, OpenShift, &c.) can publish an Instance provider template
> 
> How else might we improve this? Well, having to load a template from a URL is definitely a limitation - albeit not a new one (the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resource type already has this limitation). Perhaps we should let the user post multiple, named, implementations of a resource type and reference them by name (instead of URL) in the "Provider" field.
> 
> * Modify the resource instantiation to search among multiple named definitions (either Custom or Plugin) for a resource type, according to the "Provider" name.
> * Add an API for posting multiple named implementations of a resource type.
> 
> + The user can modify the default Provider for a resource if they so desire (but this is tenant-wide... or perhaps that's where Environments come in).
> + Provider templates can be uploaded directly to Heat instead of e.g. to Swift.
> + Operators can reuse the mechanism to provide versioned Plugins and/or multiple implementations of Resource types.
> 
> 
> So, in summary, this plan appears to provide real, identified value to users; relies for the most part on existing technology in Heat (nested stacks are actually pretty cool, if I may say so); includes a series of changes required to implement the feature; has zero impact on existing users; does not IMO decrease maintainability of the Heat code base; and is entirely achievable before the Havana feature freeze, which is only ~4 months from now.
> 
> That said, I am not wedded to any of the particular details of this proposal - though I do regard it as a real proposal, not just a straw man. If anybody has suggestions for where I've got the requirements, concepts or implementation ideas wrong then rip in. But I'd love to hear either a discussion at the level of these concrete details or a competing proposal at a similar level.
> 
> 
> For easier collation, please categorise your response as follows:
> (A) I'm appalled at the mere suggestion
> (B) This just prevents us solving the real problem (please specify)
> (C) Meh
> (D) This looks kind of interesting
> (E) OMG!! UNICORNS!!!
> 
> ;)
> 
> cheers,
> Zane.
> 
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