Open Stack

Greetings! I am new to OpenStack and have a few questions:

1. Is the "Walk-through in a stack's lifetime" section of this Wiki page accurate as of Icehouse? If not, what has changed?

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Heat/ApplicationDeployment

2. Related to #1, going forward, is it recommended to move off cfn-tools and on to cloud-init?

3. With Software Config/Deployment being bona fide resources, I imagine completion is signaled just like any other resource.

If I understand correctly, resources signal via RPC (yes?). Do software deployment resources work the same way under the hood (in particular between the VM and Nova)?

4. Given a stack with a server resource, suppose a template update moves this resource into an AutoScaling Group (same resource name). Is the resource ostensibly left as-is or is this always a destructive operation? Also, is this true for *any* resource placed into such a group during an update?

I ask because it looks like AutoScaling invokes a nested call to Heat, passing along all the resources under its purview. I'm unsure how that nesting is handled in the case of updates and upstream resources, especially if the nested stack has its own ID (tracked, I imagine, as part of an AutoScaling Group).

Thank you!