Open Stack

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 2:16 PM, Paul Bourke <paul.bourke at oracle.com> wrote:
> 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.

It's still very obscure to me how removing the scripts from kolla
images will benefit consumers. If the reason is that you want to
re-use them in other, non-kolla images, I believe we should package
the scripts. I've left some comments in your spec review.

> 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:

You're pointing a very real documentation issue. I've mentioned in the
other kolla thread that I have a stub for the kolla API documentation.
I'll push a patch for what I have and we can iterate on that.

>   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.

Sure, using the docker API works for simpler cases, not too
surprisingly once you start doing more funky things with your
containers you're quickly reach the docker API limitations. That's
when the kolla API comes in handy.
See for example this recent patch
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/556673/ where we needed to change
some file permission to the uid/gid of the user inside the container.

The first iteration basically used the docker API and started an
additional container to fix the permissions:

  docker run -v
/etc/pki/tls/certs/neutron.crt:/etc/pki/tls/certs/neutron.crt:rw \
        -v /etc/pki/tls/private/neutron.key:/etc/pki/tls/private/neutron.key:rw
\
        neutron_image \
        /bin/bash -c 'chown neutron:neutron
/etc/pki/tls/certs/neutron.crt; chown neutron:neutron
/etc/pki/tls/private/neutron.key'

You'll agree this is not the most obvious. And it had a nasty side
effect that is changes the permissions of the files _on the host_.
While using kolla API we could simply add to our config.json:

  - path: /etc/pki/tls/certs/neutron.crt
    owner: neutron:neutron
  - path: /etc/pki/tls/private/neutron.key
    owner: neutron:neutron

> 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.

TripleO uses these scripts extensively, we certainly do not want to
see them go away from kolla images.

Martin

> 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
>
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