Open Stack

On Fri, 2016-08-05 at 12:27 +0200, Dmitry Tantsur wrote:
> On 08/04/2016 11:48 PM, Dan Prince wrote:
> > 
> > Last week I started some prototype work on what could be a new way
> > to
> > install the Undercloud. The driving force behind this was some of
> > the
> > recent "composable services" work we've done in TripleO so
> > initially I
> > called in composable undercloud. There is an etherpad here with
> > links
> > to some of the patches already posted upstream (many of which stand
> > as
> > general imporovements on their own outside the scope of what I'm
> > talking about here).
> > 
> > https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/tripleo-composable-undercloud
> > 
> > The idea in short is that we could spin up a small single process
> > all-
> > in-one heat-all (engine and API) and thereby avoid things like
> > Rabbit,
> > and MySQL. Then we can use Heat templates to drive the Undercloud
> > deployment just like we do in the Overcloud.
> I don't want to sound rude, but please no. The fact that you have a 
> hammer does not mean everything around is nails :( What problem are
> you 
> trying to solve by doing it?

Several problems I think.

One is TripleO has gradually moved away from elements. And while we
still use DIB elements for some things we no longer favor that tool and
instead rely on Heat and config management tooling to do our stepwise
deployment ordering. This leaves us using instack-undercloud a tool
built specifically to install elements locally as a means to create our
undercloud. It works... and I do think we've packaged it nicely but it
isn't the best architectural fit for where we are going I think. I
actually think that from an end/user contribution standpoint using t-h-
t could be quite nice for adding features to the Undercloud.

Second would be re-use. We just spent a huge amount of time in Newton
(and some in Mitaka) refactoring t-h-t around composable services. So
say you add a new composable service for Barbican in the Overcloud...
wouldn't it be nice to be able to consume the same thing in your
Undercloud as well? Right now you can't, you have to do some of the
work twice and in quite different formats I think. Sure, there is some
amount of shared puppet work but that is only part of the picture I
think.

There are new features to think about here too. Once upon a time
TripleO supported multi-node underclouds. When we switched to instack-
undercloud we moved away from that. By switching back to tripleo-heat-
templates we could structure our templates around abstractions like
resource groups and the new 'deployed-server' trick that allow you to
create machines either locally or perhaps via Ironic too. We could
avoid Ironic entirely and always install the Undercloud on existing
servers via 'deployed-server' as well.

Lastly, there is container work ongoing for the Overcloud. Again, I'd
like to see us adopt a format that would allow it to be used in the
Undercloud as well as opposed to having to re-implement features in the
Over and Under clouds all the time.

> 
> Undercloud installation is already sometimes fragile, but it's
> probably 
> the least fragile part right now (at least from my experience) And
> at 
> the very least it's pretty obviously debuggable in most cases. THT
> is 
> hard to understand and often impossible to debug. I'd prefer we move 
> away from THT completely rather than trying to fix it in one more
> place 
> where heat does not fit..

What tool did you have in mind. FWIW I started with heat because by
using just Heat I was able to take the initial steps to prototype this.

In my mind Mistral might be next here and in fact it already supports
the single process launching idea thing. Keeping the undercloud
installer as light as possible would be ideal though.

Dan

> 
> > 
> > 
> > I created a short video demonstration which goes over some of the
> > history behind the approach, and shows a live demo of all of this
> > working with the patches above:
> > 
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1qMDLAf26Q
> > 
> > Thoughts? Would it be cool to have a session to discuss this more
> > in
> > Barcelona?
> > 
> > Dan Prince (dprince)
> > 
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