Open Stack

OpenStack Devs,

I'd like to introduce you to a team working on an interesting problem space. We would like to know what you think about Configuration Discovery. We plan to build a tool that aids in the process of automated configuration discovery.

At Rackspace we work with customers who have pre-existing infrastructure and software running in production. To help them with changes, migrations, or configuration management, we often have to determine what they have in-place already. We have some tools and knowledge in-house that we use now, but we would like to create something even better in the open that would integrate well with OpenStack ecosystem projects like Heat, Solum, Murano, etc…

The concept for the tool is simple. The inputs are facts we know about the current system (a username, API Key, URL, etc.) and the output is a set of structured configuration information. That information can be used for:

- Generating Heat Templates
- Solum Application creation/import
- Creation of Chef recipes/cookbooks, Puppet modules, Ansible playbooks, setup scripts, etc..
- Configuration analysis (compare this config with a catalog of best practices)
- Configuration monitoring (has the configuration changed?)
- Troubleshooting

We would like to hear from anyone interested in this problem domain, start a conversation on how this fits in the OpenStack ecosystem, and start exploring possible use cases that would be useful for users and operators of OpenStack clouds.

For more information about the team, implementation, and prior art in this area, please see:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Satori

Thanks,

Adrian Otto