Open Stack

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 06:54:27PM -0400, Zane Bitter wrote:
> On 09/09/14 05:52, Steven Hardy wrote:
> >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?
> >
> >- 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?
> 
> One idea we discussed at the meetup was to use the template-building code
> that we now have in Heat for building the HOT output from the translator -
> e.g. the translator would produce ResourceDefinition objects and add them to
> a HOTemplate object.
> 
> That would actually get us a long way toward an implementation of a template
> format plugin (which basically just has to spit out ResourceDefinition
> objects). So maybe that approach would allow us to start in
> python-heatclient and easily move it later into being a full-fledged
> template format plugin in Heat itself.
> 
> >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
> 
> Yep, this is a big downside (although presumably we'd want to build in a way
> to just spit out the generated template that can be used by other clients).
> 
> On the other hand, there is a big downside to having it (only) in Heat also
> - you're dependent on the operator deciding to provide it.
> 
> >- 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.
> 
> Not sure I understand this one.

I meant if non-simple TOSCA was in scope, would it make sense to bake the
translation in at the heat level, when there are aspects of the DSL which
we will never support (but some higher layer might).

Given Sahdev's response saying simple-profile is all that is currently in
scope, it's probably a non-issue, I just wanted to clarify if heat was the
right place for this translation.

Steve