Open Stack

Hello!

This looks like a perfect soapbox from which to talk about my favourite 
issue ;)

You're right about the ssh idea, for the reasons discussed related to 
networking and a few more that weren't (e.g. users shouldn't have to and 
generally don't want to give their private SSH keys to cloud services). 
I didn't know, or had forgotten, about the message queue implementation 
in Murano and while I think that's the correct shape for the solution, 
as long as the service in question is not multi-tenant capable it's a 
non-starter for a public clouds at least and probably many private 
clouds as well (after all, if you don't need multi-tenancy then why are 
you using OpenStack?).

There's been a tendency within the application-facing OpenStack projects 
to hack together whatever local solutions to problems that we can in 
order to make progress without being held up by other projects. Let's 
take a moment to acknowledge that Heat is both the earliest and the 
biggest offender here, and that I am as culpable as anyone in the 
current state of affairs. There are multiple reasons for how things have 
gone - part of it is that it turned out we developed services in the 
wrong order, starting at too high a level. Part of it, frankly, is due 
to that element of the community that maintains a hostile position 
toward application-facing services and have used their influence in the 
community to maintain a disincentive against integrating projects 
together.[1] (If deployment of your project is discouraged that's one 
thing, but if it depends on another project whose deployment is also 
being discouraged then the hurdle you have to jump over is twice the 
height.)

That said, I think we're at the point where we are hurting ourselves 
more than anyone else is by failing to come up with coherent, 
cross-project solutions.

The problem articulated in this thread is not an isolated one. It's part 
of a more general pattern that affects a lot of projects: we need a way 
for the cloud to communicate to applications running in it. Angus 
started a recent discussion of this already on the list.[2] The 
requirements, IMHO, are roughly:

  * Reliability - we must be able to guarantee delivery to applications
  * Asynchrony - the cloud cannot block on user-controlled processes
  * Multitenancy - this is table stakes for OpenStack
  * Access control - even within tenants, we need to trust guest VMs 
minimally

IMNSHO Zaqar messages are the obvious choice for the transport here. (Or 
something very similar in shape to Zaqar - but it'd be much better to 
join forces with the Zaqar team to improve it where necessary than to 
start a new project.) I really believe that if we work together to come 
up with consistent solutions to these problems that keep popping up 
across OpenStack, we can prove wrong all the naysayers who think that 
application-facing services are only for proprietary clouds. I wrote up 
my vision for why that's important and what there first steps are here:

http://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2015/04/24#a-vision-for-openstack

Note that there are some subtleties that not everyone here will be able 
to contribute directly to fixing. For example, as I highlight in that 
post, Keystone is built around the concept that applications never talk 
to the cloud. But there are lots of other things people can work on now 
that would really make a big difference. For Mistral and Murano 
specifically, and in rough order of priority:

  * Add an action in Mistral for sending a message to a Zaqar queue. 
This is easy and there's no reason you couldn't do it right now.
  * Encourage any deployers and distributors you know (or, ahem, may 
work for ;) to make Zaqar available as an option.
  * Add a way to trigger a Mistral workflow with a Zaqar message. This 
is one piece in the puzzle to build user-configurable messaging flows 
between OpenStack services.[3]
  * Make Zaqar an alternative to Rabbit for communicating to the Murano 
agent.
  * Use your experience in implementing notifications over email and the 
like in Mistral to help the Zaqar team to add the notification features 
they've long been planning. These could take the form of microservices 
listening on a Zaqar queue. You get the reliable, asynchronous queuing 
semantics for free and *every* service and user can benefit from your work.

Imagine if there were one place where we implemented reliable queuing 
semantics at cloud scale, and when we added e.g. long-polling or 
WebSockets everyone could benefit immediately.[4] Imagine if there were 
one place for notifications, at cloud scale, for operators to secure. 
(How many webhook implementations are there in OpenStack right now? How 
many of them are actually secure against malicious users?) One format 
for messages between services so that users can connect up their own 
custom pipelines. We're not that far away! All of this is within reach 
if we work together.

Thanks for reading. Please grab me at summit if you want to know more; I 
am always happy to bend the ear of anyone who will listen at length on 
this topic. As usual, I'll be the tall dude with the weird accent ;)

cheers,
Zane.


[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/180112/
[2] 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/060748.html
[3] 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062617.html
[4] 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062619.html


On 06/05/15 11:42, Filip Blaha wrote:
> Hello
>
> We are considering implementing  actions on services of a murano
> environment via mistral workflows. We are considering whether mistral
> std.ssh action could be used to run some command on an instance. Example
> of such action in murano could be restart action on Mysql DB service.
> Mistral workflow would ssh to that instance running Mysql and run
> "service mysql restart". From my point of view trying to use SSH to
> access instances from mistral workflow is not good
> idea but I would like to confirm it.
>
> The biggest problem I see there is openstack networking. Mistral service
> running on some openstack node would not be able to access instance via
> its fixed IP (e.g. 10.0.0.5) via SSH. Instance could accessed via ssh
> from namespace of its gateway router e.g. "ip netns exec qrouter-... ssh
> cirros at 10.0.0.5" but I think it is not good to rely on implementation
> detail of  neutron and use it. In multinode openstack deployment it
> could be even more complicated.
>
> In other words I am asking whether we can use std.ssh mistral action to
> access instances via ssh on theirs fixed IPs? I think no but I would
> like to confirm it.
>
> Thanks
> Filip
>
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