[openstack-dev] Announcing Higgins -- Container management service for OpenStack

Hongbin Lu hongbin.lu at huawei.com
Fri Jun 3 20:35:59 UTC 2016


Hi all,

We would like to introduce you a new container project for OpenStack called Higgins (might be renamed later [1]).

Higgins is a Container Management service for OpenStack. The key objective of the Higgins project is to enable tight integration between OpenStack and container technologies. In before, there is no perfect solution that can effectively bring containers to OpenStack. Magnum provides service to provision and manage Container Orchestration Engines (COEs), such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos, on top of Nova instances, but container management is out of its scope [2]. Nova-docker enables operating Docker containers from existing Nova APIs, but it can't support container features that go beyond the compute model. Heat docker plugin allows using Docker containers as Heat resources, but it has a similar limitation as nova-docker. Generally speaking, OpenStack is lack of a container management service that can integrate containers with OpenStack, and Higgins is created to fill the gap.

Higgins aims to provide an OpenStack-native API for launching and managing containers backed by different container technologies, such as Docker, Rocket etc. Higgins doesn't require calling other services/tools to provision the container infrastructure. Instead, it relies on existing infrastructure that is setup by operators. In our vision, the key value Higgins brings to OpenStack is enabling one platform for provisioning and managing VMs, baremetals, and containers as compute resource. In particular, VMs, baremetals, and containers will share the following:
- Single authentication and authorization system: Keystone
- Single UI Dashboard: Horizon
- Single resource and quota management
- Single block storage pools: Cinder
- Single networking layer: Neutron
- Single CLI: OpenStackClient
- Single image management: Glance
- Single Heat template for orchestration
- Single resource monitoring and metering system: Telemetry

For more information, please find below:
Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Higgins
The core team: https://review.openstack.org/#/admin/groups/1382,members
Team meeting: Every Tuesday 0300 UTC at #openstack-meeting

NOTE: we are looking for feedback to shape the project roadmap. If you're interested in this project, we appreciate your inputs in the etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/container-management-service

Best regards,
The Higgins team

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-May/095746.html
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/311476/
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