Open Stack

On 01/11/2016 04:51 PM, Dan Prince wrote:
> Background info:
>
> We've got a problem in TripleO at the moment where many of our
> workflows can be driven by the command line only. This causes some
> problems for those trying to build a UI around the workflows in that
> they have to duplicate deployment logic in potentially multiple places.
> There are specs up for review which outline how we might solve this
> problem by building what is called TripleO API [1].
>
> Late last year I began experimenting with an OpenStack service called
> Mistral which contains a generic workflow API. Mistral supports
> defining workflows in YAML and then creating, managing, and executing
> them via an OpenStack API. Initially the effort was focused around the
> idea of creating a workflow in Mistral which could supplant our
> "baremetal introspection" workflow which currently lives in python-
> tripleoclient. I create a video presentation which outlines this effort
> [2]. This particular workflow seemed to fit nicely within the Mistral
> tooling.
>
> ----
>
> More recently I've turned my attention to what it might look like if we
> were to use Mistral as a replacement for the TripleO API entirely. This
> brings forth the question of would TripleO be better off building out
> its own API... or would relying on existing OpenStack APIs be a better
> solution?
>
> Some things I like about the Mistral solution:
>
> - The API already exists and is generic.
>
> - Mistral already supports interacting with many of the OpenStack API's
> we require [3]. Integration with keystone is baked in. Adding support
> for new clients seems straightforward (I've had no issues in adding
> support for ironic, inspector, and swift actions).
>
> - Mistral actions are pluggable. We could fairly easily wrap some of
> our more complex workflows (perhaps those that aren't easy to replicate
> with pure YAML workflows) by creating our own TripleO Mistral actions.
> This approach would be similar to creating a custom Heat resource...
> something we have avoided with Heat in TripleO but I think it is
> perhaps more reasonable with Mistral and would allow us to again build
> out our YAML workflows to drive things. This might allow us to build
> off some of the tripleo-common consolidation that is already underway
> ...
>
> - We could achieve a "stable API" by simply maintaining input
> parameters for workflows in a stable manner. Or perhaps workflows get
> versioned like a normal API would be as well.
>
> - The purist part of me likes Mistral quite a bit. It fits nicely with
> the deploy OpenStack with OpenStack. I sort of feel like if we have to
> build our own API in TripleO part of this vision has failed and could
> even be seen as a massive technical debt which would likely be hard to
> build a community around outside of TripleO.
>
> - Some of the proposed validations could perhaps be implemented as new
> Mistral actions as well. I'm not convinced we require TripleO API just
> to support a validations mechanism yet. Perhaps validations seem hard
> because we are simply trying to do them in the wrong places anyway?
> (like for example perhaps we should validate network connectivity at
> inspection time rather than during provisioning).
>
> - Power users might find a workflow built around a Mistral API more
> easy to interact with and expand upon. Perhaps this ends up being
> something that gets submitted as a patchset back to the TripleO that we
> accept into our upstream "stock" workflow sets.
>
> ----
>
> Last week we landed the last patches [4] to our undercloud to enable
> installing Mistral by simply setting: enable_mistral = true in
> undercloud.conf. NOTE: you'll need to be using a recent trunk repo from
> Delorean so that you have the recently added Mistral packages for this
> to work. Although the feature is disable by default this should enable
> those wishing to tinker with Mistral as a new TripleO undercloud
> service an easy path forwards.
>
> [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/230432
> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnAT37O-sdw
> [3] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/mistral/tree/mistral/action
> s/openstack/mapping.json
> [4] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/tripleo-undercloud-workflow
>
>
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Hi, I have a few questions:

Is Mistral action able to access/manipulate local files? E.g. access the 
templates installed at undercloud's 
/usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates?

I Mistral action able to call either OpenStack service python client or 
OpenStack service API directly?

What is the response from the Mistral action in the workflow? Lets say 
we'd use Mistral to get a list of available environments (we do this in 
tripleo-common now) So we call Mistral API to trigger a workflow that 
has single action which gets the list of environments. Is mistral able 
to provide this list as a response, or it is able just to trigger a 
workflow?

In similar manner, is Mistral able to provide a way to get workflow in 
progress data? E.g. We have a Mistral workflow for nodes introspection. 
This workflow contains several actions calling to ironic and 
ironic-inspector apis. GUI calls Mistral API to trigger the workflow and 
now it needs to have a way to track the progress of that workflow. How 
would this be achieved? I think forcing GUI to poll the APIs that are 
called in the actions and try to implement logic that estimates what 
state the workflow is to report about it is not a valid solution. We 
need the workflow API (Mistral) to provide a lets say web sockets 
connection and push the status of actions along with relevant data, so 
GUI can listen to those.

I am about to implement your nodes workflow in the GUI to test how it works.

Jirka