Open Stack

Excerpts from Joshua Harlow's message of 2015-04-03 10:08:07 -0700:
> Monty Taylor wrote:
> > On 04/03/2015 08:55 AM, Maish Saidel-Keesing wrote:
> >> I was wondering..
> >>
> >> Is the OpenStack CI/CD Infra using Heat in any way? Do the commits
> >> trigger a new build of DevStack/OpenStack that is based on a Heat
> >> Template or just the provisioning of a regular instance and then
> >> deployment of code on top of that?
> >
> > Nope - we do not use heat - we use a program called nodepool:
> >
> > http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/nodepool/
> >
> > Which uses the nova api to provision servers. These servers are
> > currently registered as jenkins slaves so that the workload run on them
> > is defined a s jenkins job.
> >
> > There are a few reasons we do not use heat for this - none of them I
> > think of as negative against heat:
> >
> > - Our pool spans 4 regions of 2 public clouds. Heat runs in a cloud, the
> > positioning is wrong
> > - Our pool is predominantly single-machines that are used once - which
> > means a heat template would add extra complexity for not much gain.
> > - Our current system predates the existence of heat. It is also highly
> > specific to the task at hand - namely, ensuring that there are always
> > test nodes available.
> 
> Can these things be fixed? Heat afaik isn't a frozen piece of sofware... 
> It would be pretty neat to use the projects that we have that others are 
> using if we could. Might be an interesting summit topic/idea?
> 

Monty said these aren't negatives. They're just aspects. Heat is
supposed to alleviate you from needing to build something specific like
Nodepool. But it wasn't there, and nodepool is specific to the task,
so there's no point in using Heat for it. It's like using hammer and
nails to build your scaffolding because you don't have a nailgun. Was
it ideal? No, but at this point, the scaffolding is built.. no point in
tearing it down so you can build it again, only faster.