Open Stack

On 07/03/17 14:34, James Slagle wrote:
> I've been working on this spec for TripleO:
> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/431745/
>
> which allows users to selectively disable Heat deployment resources
> for a given server (or server in the case of a *DeloymentGroup
> resource).

I'm not completely clear on what this means. You can selectively disable 
resources with conditionals. But I think you mean that you want to 
selectively disable *changes* to resources?

> Some of the main use cases in TripleO for such a feature are scaling
> out compute nodes where you do not need to rerun Puppet (or make any
> changes at all) on non-compute nodes, or to exclude nodes from hanging
> a stack-update if you know they are unreachable or degraded for some
> reason. There are others, but those are 2 of the major use cases.

I think you're running up against a limitation of the scaling group 
implementation in Heat. In AWS Autoscaling, you have a LaunchConfig 
associated with a group that is used when scaling up to create new 
members, but existing members are not changed when you specify a new 
LaunchConfig unless you also specifically include a rolling update 
UpdatePolicy. (That isn't a great interface in CloudFormation, but it 
works and I can't actually think of anything better.)

Heat's AWS-style resources work similarly. Heat's native autoscaling 
group resources don't have a separate LaunchConfig, and although they 
used to work similarly to the AWS ones with respect to when they would 
update existing members, IIRC somebody decided that was a "bug" and 
"fixed" it.

In any event, TripleO uses ResourceGroup, and the very existence of 
ResourceGroup is predicated on the idea that you can just generate the 
nested template by making copies of the inline resource definition - 
that is, the idea that you'll *never* need this feature which it turns 
out you do, in fact, need. TripleO can't move away from ResourceGroup 
because it relies on it to auto-assign pre-chosen names for specific 
servers.

Senlin, for the record, gets this right.

> I started by taking an approach that would be specific to TripleO.
> Basically mapping all the deployment resources to a nested stack
> containing the logic to selectively disable servers from the
> deployment (using yaql) based on a provided parameter value. Here's
> the main patch: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/442681/
>
> After considering that complexity, particularly the yaql expression,
> I'm wondering if it would be better to add this support natively to
> Heat.
>
> I was looking at the restricted_actions key in the resource_registry
> and was thinking this might be a reasonable place to add such support.
> It would require some changes to how restricted_actions work.
>
> One change would be a method for specifying that restricted_actions
> should not fail the stack operation if an action would have otherwise
> been triggered. Currently the behavior is to raise an exception and
> mark the stack failed if an action needs to be taken but has been
> marked restricted. That would need to be tweaked to allow specifying
> that that we don't want the stack to fail. One thought would be to
> change the allowed values of restricted_actions to:
>
> replace_fail
> replace_ignore
> update_fail
> update_ignore
> replace
> update
>
> where replace and update were synonyms for replace_fail/update_fail to
> maintain backwards compatibility.

Anything that involves the resource definition in the template changing 
but Heat not modifying the resource is problematic, because that messes 
with Heat's internal bookkeeping.

> Another change would be to add logic to the Deployment resources
> themselves to consider if any restricted_actions have been set on an
> Server resources before triggering an updated deployment for a given
> server.

Why not just a property, "no_new_deployments_please: true"?

> It also might be nice to allow specifying restricted_actions on the
> server's name property (which typically is the hostname) instead of
> having to use the resource name. The reason being is that it is not
> really feasibly to expect operators/users to have to represent the
> full nested_stack structure in their resource_registry. They would
> have to query and record nested_stack names just to refer to a given
> server resource. Each ResourceGroup nested stack would be have to be
> individually represented, etc. Unless there is another way I'm
> overlooking.
>
> Whether or not the restricted_actions approach is taken, is Heat
> interested in this functionality natively? I think it would make for a
> much cleaner implementation than something TripleO specific. I can
> work on a Heat spec if there's interest, though I'd like to get some
> early feedback.
>
> Thanks.
>