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Hi Steve, sure. Please see my reply in-line. 

Thanks! 

Regards, 
Sahdev




From:   Steven Hardy <shardy at redhat.com>
To:     "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" 
<openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Date:   09/09/2014 05:55 AM
Subject:        Re: [openstack-dev] [Heat] Request for python-heatclient 
project to adopt heat-translator



Hi Sahdev,

On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 11:52:30AM -0400, Sahdev P Zala wrote:
>    Hello guys,
> 
>    As you know, the heat-translator project was started early this year 
with
>    an aim to create a tool to translate non-Heat templates to HOT. It is 
a
>    StackForge project licensed under Apache 2. We have made good 
progress
>    with its development and a demo was given at the OpenStack 2014 
Atlanta
>    summit during a half-a-day session that was dedicated to 
heat-translator
>    project and related TOSCA discussion. Currently the development and
>    testing is done with the TOSCA template format but the tool is 
designed to
>    be generic enough to work with templates other than TOSCA. There are 
five
>    developers actively contributing to the development. In addition, all
>    current Heat core members are already core members of the 
heat-translator
>    project.
> 
>    Recently, I attended Heat Mid Cycle Meet Up for Juno in Raleigh and
>    updated the attendees on heat-translator project and ongoing 
progress. I
>    also requested everyone for a formal adoption of the project in the
>    python-heatclient and the consensus was that it is the right thing to 
do.
>    Also when the project was started, the initial plan was to make it
>    available in python-heatclient. Hereby, the heat-translator team 
would
>    like to make a request to have the heat-translator project to be 
adopted
>    by the python-heatclient/Heat program.

Obviously I wasn't at the meetup, so I may be missing some context here,
but can you answer some questions please?

- Is the scope for heat-translator only tosca simple-profile, or also the
  original more heavyweight tosca too?

Heat-translator is designed to be used to translate any non-Heat templates 
to HOT. However, current development is done for the TOSCA simple-profile 
only and there is no plan to use it for heavyweight TOSCA.

- If it's only tosca simple-profile, has any thought been given to moving
  towards implementing support via a template parser plugin, rather than
  baking the translation into the client?

At the meetup, Randall and Zane also mentioned that we should dig into the 
plugin and see if that can also be used for TOSCA. However, we all agreed 
that translation is still good to have and if plugin can be used that will 
be another option for TOSCA users.

While I see this effort as valuable, integrating the translator into the
client seems the worst of all worlds to me:

- Any users/services not intefacing to heat via python-heatclient can't 
use it

With python-heatclient, translator will just add a command line option 
i.e. something like ‘heat-translator <format to translate e.g. tosca> 
<noh-heat-template.yaml>' which will provide an output as HOT. The user 
needs to take the translated template and run it with Heat.

- You prempt the decision about integration with any higher level 
services,
  e.g Mistral, Murano, Solum, if you bake in the translator at the
  heat level.

Hopefully that won't happen. The translator can be a simple integration at 
the client level and provided just as a command line option without any 
added complexity. 

The scope question is probably key here - if you think the translator can
do (or will be able to do) a 100% non-lossy conversion to HOT using only
Heat, maybe it's time we considered discussing integration into Heat the
service rather than the client.

   When the project was started, there was a discussion with Steve Baker 
and others on IRC that initially it is a good idea to provide the 
translator tool to users via python-heatclient and eventually, as the tool 
gets more mature, we can discuss to make it available in Heat engine to 
provide a seamless deployment of translated template.

Conversely, if you're going to need other services to fully implement the
spec, it probably makes sense for the translator to remain layered over
heat (or integrated with another project which is layered over heat).

  The translator project has no dependency on other services and hoping 
for the same in future.


I hope my answers make sense. Please let me know if you have further 
questions.


Thanks!

Steve

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