Open Stack

Hi,

It has been a pretty crazy month with a lot of action on many fronts,
so I thought I'd call out Centos and Fedora testing for those
interested.

There are really 3 Centos environments in flight

  - snapshot images
  - DIB images built ontop of the upstream cloud-image release
  - DIB based "minimal" builds

Snapshot images are in active use on RAX and were used on HP Cloud.
These use the underlying image provided by the upstream provider and
run our setup scripts ontop of that.

The diskimage-builder (DIB) images built ontop of the upstream
released cloud-images have been building and working, but never really
been used in production.  The main reason is that they are based on
cloud-init, and thus incompatible with networking setup on RAX, so it
was not possible to deploy universally.  As described below, rather
than putting in more work here, we've been working on fixing the
"minimal" builds -- these builds create the vm image from essentially
a blank chroot, and use a different suite of tools such as glean and
growroot rather than cloud-init for maximum compatibility with our
provider platforms.

Because the snapshot images are based on the upstream providers image,
any customisation done there usually breaks our scripts.  Thanks to
jeblair and mordred, we discovered that the OVH Centos7 image indeed
does not work.  However, as an intermediate step, we can use the DIB
cloud-image based builds there.

---

Fedora has been one heck of a mess.  Several huge things happened in
Fedora 22 -- the default package installer switched to dnf, the
default puppet changed to version 4 and we made the move to "minimal"
builds.  Any one of these things is a big change -- all together has
meant a lot of work untangling things into a working state.  In the
last little while we can add to that major issues with pip and further
changes to nodepool's building mechanisms.

We a lot of effort from all concerned, we have working Fedora 23 nodes
based on fedora-minimal images in RAX (i.e. zuul knows about them and
tries to run jobs on them).  I believe at this point, devstack jobs
should be OK once we fix up issues with increasing disk-space [1,2].
Once we are stable on RAX, we can roll this out to other providers.

---

The Fedora work has had the nice effect of shaking out most of the
issues with centos-minimal builds too.  We have just one small issue
blocking builds [3].

Thus our path forward for the next little while will be standarising
all testing on our centos-minimal & fedora-minimal based DIB images
across all providers.  I hope to switch RAX to centos-minimal builds
soon, and deploy both fedora-minimal and centos-minimal more widely.

Thanks,

-i

[1] https://review.openstack.org/271862
[2] https://review.openstack.org/271907
[3] https://review.openstack.org/272857