[Openstack-operators] [Keystone][PublicCloud] Introducing Adjutant, an OpenStack service for signups, user invites, password reset and more!

Andy Botting andy at andybotting.com
Fri Jun 2 02:48:51 UTC 2017


We caught up with some of the Catalyst guys at the Melbourne OpenStack
Australia day and they gave us a demo of this. Looks like a really nice
project that I think might replace some of existing user management
workflow.

Allowing project managers to invite collaborators and self-manage their
permissions and to create nested projects (without requiring admin
intervention) would work well for us on the Nectar cloud.

Thanks for the contribution Adrian. Hoping we can find some time soon to
test this out and contribute.

cheers,
Andy

On 29 May 2017 at 17:01, Adrian Turjak <adriant at catalyst.net.nz> wrote:

> Hello OpenStack Community,
>
> I'd like to introduce to you all a service we have developed at Catalyst
> and are now ready to release to the OpenStack community in hopes that
> others may find it useful. As a public cloud provider we quickly ran into a
> bunch of little issues around user management, sign-ups, and other pieces
> of business logic that needed to fit into how we administer the cloud but
> didn't entirely make sense as additions to existing services. There were
> also a lot of actions we wanted to delegate to our customers but couldn't
> do without giving them too much power in Keystone, or wanted those actions
> to send emails, or extend to external non-OpenStack services.
>
> Enter Adjutant. Adjutant (previously called StackTask) was built as a
> service to allow us to create business workflows that can be exposed in
> some fashion over an API. A way for us to build reusable snippets of code
> that we can tie together, and a flexible and pluggable API layer we can
> expose those on. We needed these to be able to talk to our external
> systems, as well as our OpenStack services, and provide us some basic steps
> and in some cases the ability to require approval before an action
> completes. In many ways Adjutant also works as a layer around Keystone for
> us to build business logic around certain things we'd like our customers to
> be able to do in very limited ways.
>
> The service itself is built on Django with Django-Rest-Framework and is an
> API service with the gui component built as a ui plugin for Horizon that
> allows easy integration into an OpenStack dashboard.
>
> Adjutant, as the name implies, is a helper, not a major service, but one
> that smooths some situations and an easy place to offload some admin tasks
> that a customer or non-admin should be able to trigger in a more limited
> way. Not only that, but it stores the history of all these tasks, who asked
> for them, and when they were completed. Anything a user does through
> Adjutant is stored and able to be audited, with in future the ability for
> project admins to be able to audit their own tasks and see who of their
> users did something.
>
> Out of the box it provides the following functionality:
>
>    - User invitation by users with the 'project_admin' or 'project_mod'
>    role.
>       - This will send out an email to the person you've invited with a
>       submission token and let them setup their password and then grants them
>       roles on your project. If their user exists already, will only require
>       confirmation and then grant roles.
>    - As a 'project_admin' or 'project_mod' you can list the users with
>    roles on your project and edit their roles or revoke them from your project.
>    - Let non-admin users request a password reset.
>       - User will be emailed a token which will let them reset their
>       password.
>    - Basic signup
>       - Let a user request a new project. Requires admin approval and
>       will create a new project and user, granting default roles on the new
>       project. Will reuse existing user if present, or send an email to the user
>       to setup their password.
>    - Let a user update their email address.
>       - Will notify old email, and send a confirmation token to the new.
>
> Features coming in the future (most either almost done, or in prototype
> stages):
>
>    - Forced password reset
>    - users with 'project_admin' or 'project_mod' can force a password
>       reset for a given user in their projects
>       - cloud admins can force password resets for users on their cloud.
>       - changes user password to a randomly generated value and sends
>       user a password reset token to their email.
>       - user must reset before they can log in again.
>    - Quota management for your project
>       - As a 'project_admin' or 'project_mod' you can request a change in
>       quota to a set of predefined sizes (as set in the Adjutant conf). Sizes
>       allows you to increase multiple related quotas at the same time. You can
>       move to adjacent sizes without approval a number of times in a configurable
>       window (days), or an admin can approve your quota change as well.
>    - Hierarchical Multi-Tenancy in a single domain environment
>       - 'project_admin' to be able to create sub-projects off the current
>       scoped project.
>       - This uses HMT properly in Keystone but does not require an admin
>       role and enforces a naming convention to ensure unique namespaces per
>       sub-projects and somewhat avoids the project name uniqueness issues per
>       domain. It's basically some wrapper logic for HMT in Keystone.
>       - This also adds inherited role support to the already existing
>       user invite and user role editing features.
>       - some VERY basic sub-project quota (number of sub-projects
>       allowed) via metadata stored on a project in Keystone, with quota
>       calculations in Adjutant checking against number of sub-projects created in
>       your WHOLE tree within given shifting window. This is mainly to stop
>       sub-projects as a means of getting around quota limits, and allows admins
>       to approve sub-projects if beyond what a customer is allowed normally.
>       - Account termination/resource termination
>       - Be able to delete/disable a project and all the resources in it
>       in one go, with some reporting, validation, and confirmation.
>       - A way to setup and manage MFA credentials for a user
>       - relies on work in Keystone around MFA, and serves only as a means
>       to allow an initial challenge response that requires an initial passcode
>       before MFA would become active for the user in Keystone.
>       - and a similar process for deactivating MFA by needing a passcode.
>       - with an adjutant-ui panel that displays an SVG QR code.
>    - Support for User stores beyond Keystone
>       - Allow Adjutant to create/manage users in LDAP/AD as part of
>       normal user workflows.
>       - This feature was always planned since Keystone does not support
>       creation/editing when users come from LDAP, so the existing user store
>       module is mostly an abstraction layer that can be made pluggable.
>
>
> Adjutant also supports a simple enough plugin system that lets you
> override existing actions and taskviews or build on top of them for your
> own deployments or company specific circumstances. This lets you use the
> core benefits of the service while keeping your company specific code in a
> separate codebase that is easy to integrate.
>
> The repos will soon be on the OpenStack gerrit, with launchpad for
> bug/blueprints, but for now can be found here:
> https://github.com/catalyst/adjutant
> https://github.com/catalyst/adjutant-ui
> https://github.com/catalyst/python-adjutantclient
>
> The python client and cli are also on pypi:
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-adjutantclient
> <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-stacktaskclient>
>
> And there are existing tempest tests that need to be greatly expanded (and
> also renamed):
> https://github.com/catalyst/stacktask-tempest
>
> Here is also an example plugin based on how we've integrated this with our
> ERP system:
> https://github.com/catalyst/adjutant-odoo
> And to help test the plugin and allow importing of test features Adjutant
> itself is also on pypi so plugins can use it as a requirement for testing:
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-adjutant
>
>
> Going forward we're looking for other develops and deployers in the
> OpenStack community that are either trying to solve issues that fit within
> this service, or need something that this service solves. Let us pool our
> resources and make something that can help others avoid the same pitfalls
> and development work! There is a lot more we have planned for the roadmap
> ranging from larger architectural improvements, useful features, to minor
> but useful tweaks. It still has a bunch of growth and maturity to achieve
> as a project, but we're running it in production (an older state at least,
> with newer coming soon) and it will only get better in time.
>
> If this sounds interesting to you, get in touch, try it out, get involved!
>
> Cheers,
> Adrian Turjak
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-operators mailing list
> OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-operators
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-operators/attachments/20170602/554d7c38/attachment.html>


More information about the OpenStack-operators mailing list