Open Stack

Hi all,

I would like to pick up the TOSCA topic brought up by Zane in his mail
below.

TOSCA is in fact a standard that seems closely aligned with the concepts
that Murano is implementing, so thanks Zane for bringing up this
discussion. I saw Georgy's reply early today where he stated that Murano is
actually heavily inspired by TOSCA, but Murano took a different path due to
some drawbacks in TOSCA v1.0 (e.g. XML).

I would like to point out, though, that we (TOSCA TC) are heavily working
on fixing some of the usability issues that TOSCA v1.0 has. The most
important point being that we are working on a YAML rendering, along with a
simplified profile of TOSCA, which both shall make it easier and more
attractive to use TOSCA. Much of this work has actually been inspired by
the collaboration with the Heat community and the development of the HOT
language.

That said, I would really like the Murano folks to have a look at a current
working draft of the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML which can be found at
[1]. It would be nice to get some feedback, and ideally we could even
collaborate to see if we can come up with a common solution that fits
everyone's needs. As far as topologies are concerned, we are trying to get
TOSCA YAML and HOT well aligned so we can have an easy mapping. Sahdev from
our team (IRC spzala) is actually working on a TOSCA YAML to HOT converter
which he recently put on stackforge (initial version only). With Murano it
would be interesting to see if we could collaborate on the "plans" side of
TOSCA.

Apart from pure DSL work, I think Murano has some other interesting items
that are also interesting from a TOSCA perspective. For example, I read
about a catalog that stores artifacts needed for app deployments. TOSCA
also has the concept of artifacts, and we have a packaging format to
transport a model and its associated artifacts. So if at some point we
start thinking about importing such a TOSCA archive into a layer above
today's Heat, the question is if we could use e.g. the Murano catalog for
storing all content.

All that said, I see some good opportunities for collaboration and it would
be nice to find a common solution with good alignment between projects and
to avoid duplicate efforts.

BTW, Georgy, I am impressed how closely you looked at the TOSCA spec and
the charter :-)

[1]
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=52381&wg_abbrev=tosca

Greetings,
Thomas

Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote on 04/03/2014 03:33:01:

> From: Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com>
> To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> Date: 04/03/2014 03:32
> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Incubation Request: Murano
>
> On 25/02/14 05:08, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > The second challenge is that we only started to explore the space of
> > workload lifecycle management, with what looks like slightly
overlapping
> > solutions (Heat, Murano, Solum, and the openstack-compatible PaaS
> > options out there), and it might be difficult, or too early, to pick a
> > winning complementary set.
>
> I'd also like to add that there is already a codified OASIS standard
> (TOSCA) that covers application definition at what appears to be a
> similar level to Murano. Basically it's a more abstract version of what
> Heat does plus workflows for various parts of the lifecycle (e.g.
backup).
>
> Heat and TOSCA folks have been working together since around the time of
> the Havana design summit with the aim of eventually getting a solution
> for launching TOSCA applications on OpenStack. Nothing is set in stone
> yet, but I would like to hear from the Murano folks how they are
> factoring compatibility with existing standards into their plans.
>
> cheers,
> Zane.
>