Open Stack

I spent a bunch of time working with and understanding Heat in H2, and I find myself with one overarching question which I wonder if anyone's thought about or even answered already...

At present, the CloudFormation template format is the first-class means of doing things in Heat. CloudFormation was created for Amazon, and Amazon has this massive convenience of having a (more or less) static list of images and flavors that they control. Therefore in CloudFormation everything is specified by a unique, specific name.

OpenStack doesn't have this luxury. We have as many image and flavor names as we have deployments. Now, there are simple answers...

  1. Name everything the way Amazon does, or
  2. Alter your templates.

But personally, I don't like either of these options. I think in the long term we win at platform/ecosystem by making it possible to take a template off the internet and having it work on *any* OpenStack cloud.

To get there, we need a system that chooses images based on metadata (platform, architecture, distro) and flavors based on actual minimum requirements.

Has anyone on the Heat team thought about this? Are there efforts in the works to alleviate this? Am I missing something obvious?

All the best,

    - Gabriel