Open Stack

Greetings OpenStack,

== Background

Since the beginning of OpenStack (or almost), devstack has been used
as a common tool to deploy OpenStack in CI environment. Most of
OpenStack projects (if not all) that are written in Python use it to
deploy the different components.
While devstack became popular and the reference in term of deployment
tool for continuous integration, devstack doesn't deploy OpenStack in
production (versus some tools like Kolla, Fuel, TripleO, Juju, etc).
It means things might (and did) break when deploying OpenStack outside
devstack, for different reasons. Some examples:

* until recently, SSL was not tested, and I believe some projects
still don't test with SSL enabled.
* IPv6 is not tested everywhere.
* Production scenarios, with HA (HAproxy or/and Pacemaker) are not tested.

My point here, is that devstack has been doing very good job for its
simplicity (written in bash) and its large adoption by projects to
make CI, though we might consider adding more coverage to make sure it
works outside devstack.
As an example, Puppet OpenStack modules CI is using a devstack-like
job (with 3 scenarios), called puppet-openstack-integration [1] but we
also run TripleO and Fuel CI jobs, to increase coverage and give a
better feedback on testing.


== Proposal

This is not about removing devstack! The idea is to add more coverage
in an iterative way, with some other tools.
We started some months ago by running TripleO CI jobs in Ironic and
Heat gates (experimental pipeline) because TripleO is high consumer of
Ironic and Heat.
Also, we recently added our TripleO multinode job in Nova experimental
pipeline (doc here [2]).
Now, we are moving forward with python-openstackclient and osc-lib.

I started to draft a document about how we could increase coverage in
different projects:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bLg-uEGrQXyRZ-FuR6pf1WT4XN0-6MrlfqEShI7xMxg/edit#gid=0

(feel free to add your project and give your opinion directly in the
spreadsheet).

The intention here is to discuss with teams interested by such CI
coverage. We don't want to slow down or break your gate (example with
TripleO, our jobs are non-voting outside TripleO and take ~45 min);
but reduce the feedback loop between developers and deployment tools
used in production.
We don't expect developers to investigate why new CI jobs would fail
(ex: a Nova developer to look at TripleO CI job), it would be unfair.
Just some horizontal communication would be enough, IRC or email, to
inform that a patch might break a CI job outside devstack.
I also want to mention that the proposal is not only about TripleO. I
used this tool in my examples because I'm working on it but obviously
this proposal should be open to Big Tent projects that also deploy
OpenStack.

Please give any feedback, and let's make OpenStack testing stronger!
Thanks for reading so far,

[1] https://github.com/openstack/puppet-openstack-integration
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/381838/
-- 
Emilien Macchi