Open Stack

Hi all,

I've been recently working on a Docker plugin for Heat that makes it
possible to use Docker containers as resources.

I've just opened the repository:
https://github.com/dotcloud/openstack-heat-docker

It's now possible to do that via Nova (since there is now a Docker
driver for it). But the idea here is not to replace the Nova driver
with this Heat plugin, the idea is just to propose a different path.

Basically, Docker itself has a Rest API[1] with all features needed to
deploy and manage containers, the Nova driver uses this API. However
having the Nova API in front of it makes it hard to bring all Docker
features to the user, basically everything has to fit into the Nova
API. For instance, docker commit/push are mapped to nova snapshots,
etc... And a lot of Docker features are not available yet; I admit
that some of them will be hard to support (docker Env variables,
Volumes, etc... how should they fit in Nova?).

The idea of this Docker plugin for Heat is to use the whole Docker API
directly from a template. All possible parameters for creating a
container from the Docker API[2] can be defined from the template.
This allows more flexibility.

Since this approach is a bit different from the normal OpenStack
workflow (for instance, Nova's role is to abstract all computing units
right now), I am interested to get feedback on this.

Obviously, I'll keep maintaining the Docker driver for Nova and I'm
also working on putting together some new features I'll propose for
the next release.


[1] http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/api/docker_remote_api_v1.5/
[2] http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/api/docker_remote_api_v1.5/#create-a-container

-- 
@sam_alba