Open Stack

Hi all,

This mail is to serve as a follow on to the discussion during 
yesterday's team meeting[4], which was regarding the desire to move 
start scripts out of the kolla images [0]. There's a few factors at 
play, and it may well be best left to discuss in person at the summit in 
May, but hopefully we can get at least some of this hashed out before then.

I'll start by summarising why I think this is a good idea, and then 
attempt to address some of the concerns that have come up since.

First off, to be frank, this is effort is driven by wanting to add 
support for loci images[1] in kolla-ansible. I think it would be 
unreasonable for anyone to argue this is a bad objective to have, loci 
images have very obvious benefits over what we have in Kolla today. I'm 
not looking to drop support for Kolla images at all, I simply want to 
continue decoupling things to the point where operators can pick and 
choose what works best for them. Stemming from this, I think moving 
these scripts out of the images provides a clear benefit to our 
consumers, both users of kolla and third parties such as triple-o. Let 
me explain why.

Normally, to run a docker image, a user will do 'docker run 
helloworld:latest'. In any non trivial application, config needs to be 
provided. In the vast majority of cases this is either provided via a 
bind mount (docker run -v hello.conf:/etc/hello.conf helloworld:latest), 
or via environment variables (docker run --env HELLO=paul 
helloworld:latest). This is all bog standard stuff, something anyone 
who's spent an hour learning docker can understand.

Now, lets say someone wants to try out OpenStack with Docker, and they 
look at Kolla. First off they have to look at something called 
set_configs.py[2] - over 400 lines of Python. Next they need to 
understand what that script consumes, config.json [3]. The only 
reference for config.json is the files that live in kolla-ansible, a 
mass of jinja and assumptions about how the service will be run. Next, 
they need to figure out how to bind mount the config files and 
config.json into the container in a way that can be consumed by 
set_configs.py (which by the way, requires the base kolla image in all 
cases). This is only for the config. For the service start up command, 
this need to also be provided in config.json. This command is then 
parsed out and written to a location in the image, which is consumed by 
a series of start/extend start shell scripts. Kolla is *unique* in this 
regard, no other project in the container world is interfacing with 
images in this way. Being a snowflake in this regard is not a good 
thing. I'm still waiting to hear from a real world operator who would 
prefer to spend time learning the above to doing:

   docker run -v /etc/keystone:/etc/keystone keystone:latest 
--entrypoint /usr/bin/keystone [args]

This is the Docker API, it's easy to understand and pretty much the 
standard at this point.

The other argument is that this removes the possibility for immutable 
infrastructure. The concern is, with the new approach, a rookie operator 
will modify one of the start scripts - resulting in uncertainty that 
what was first deployed matches what is currently running. But with the 
way Kolla is now, an operator can still do this! They can restart 
containers with a custom entrypoint or additional bind mounts, they can 
exec in and change config files, etc. etc. Kolla containers have never 
been immutable and we're bending over backwards to artificially try and 
make this the case. We cant protect a bad or inexperienced operator from 
shooting themselves in the foot, there are better ways of doing so. 
If/when Docker or the upstream container world solves this problem, it 
would then make sense for Kolla to follow suit.

On the face of it, what the spec proposes is a simple change, it should 
not radically pull the carpet out under people, or even change the way 
kolla-ansible works in the near term. If consumers such as tripleo or 
other parties feel it would in fact do so please do let me know and we 
can discuss and mitigate these problems.

Cheers,
-Paul

[0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/550958/
[1] https://github.com/openstack/loci
[2] 
https://github.com/openstack/kolla/blob/master/docker/base/set_configs.py
[3] 
https://github.com/openstack/kolla-ansible/blob/master/ansible/roles/keystone/templates/keystone.json.j2
[4] 
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/kolla/2018/kolla.2018-04-04-16.00.log.txt