Open Stack

We had an IRC discussion today about the 'heat-admin' user in #tripleo.

Upstream Heat recently reverted the 'instance_user' config file option
which we relied on in TripleO to standardize the default (admin) user
on our nodes. It is my understanding that Heat would prefer not to
maintain this option because it causes subtle compatibility issues
across the OpenStack and AWS APIs and the interactions between cloud
-init version, etc. So it was deprecated in Icehouse... and recently
removed in [1].

We could just go with the default distro user (centos, fedora, ubuntu,
etc.) but it would be really nice to standardize on a user name for
maintenance should anyone every spin up a cloud using multiple distros
or something.

So a couple of options. We could just go on and update our templates
like this [2]. This actually seems pretty clean to me, but it would
require anybody who has created custom firstboot scripts to do the same
(we have proposed docker patches with firstboot scripts that need
similar updates).

Alternately, we could propose that Heat revert the instance_user
feature or some version of it. We've been using that for a year or two
now and it has actually been fairly nice to set the default that way.

Thoughts?


[1] https://review.openstack.org/103928 

[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/219861/