Open Stack

Hi,

This is a little rambling, so I'll put this summary here and some discussion below. I would like to be able to add heat template fragments (primarily softwareconfig) to a template before an instance is created by Heat. This could be possible by updating but not pushing the heat template before instance.deploy, except that instance.deploy does a stack.push to configure networking before it adds information about the nova instance. This seems like the wrong place for the networking parts of the stack to be configured (maybe in the Environment before it tries to deploy applications). Thoughts?

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The long version:

I've been looking at using disk-image-builder (a project that came out of triple-o) to build images for consumption through Murano. Disk images are built from a base OS plus a set of 'elements' which can include packages to install when building the image, templatized config file etc, and allows for substitutions based on heat metadata at deploy time. This uses a lot of the existing heat software config agents taking configuration from StructuredConfig and StructuredDeployment heat elements.

I'm typically finding for our use cases that instances will tend to be single purpose (that is, the image will be created specifically to run a piece of software that requires some configuration). Currently Murano provisions the instance, and then adds software configuration as a separate stack-update step. This is quite inefficient since os-refresh-config ends up having to re-run, and so I'm wondering if there's strong opposition to allowing the object model to support injection of software configuration heat elements before the instance is deployed.

Alternatively maybe this is something that is best supported by pure HOT packages, but I think there's value having murano's composition ability even if just to be able to combine heat fragments (perhaps in the drag & drop manner that was briefly discussed in Atlanta).

Thanks,

Steve

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