Open Stack

On 10/17/2013 06:06 PM, Sam Alba wrote:
> 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
>
Why not submit the resource plugin as a patch against heat using the 
standard OpenStack workflow vs a separate repository?

Regards
-steve