Open Stack

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:41:39AM -0400, Joe D'Andrea wrote:
> Greetings! I am new to OpenStack and have a few questions:

Hi!

I see Zane has responded with answers to most of your questions, so I won't
duplicate that info here, but I can add a couple of links with some related
information you may find useful if you need more detail:

> 
> 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?

heat-cfntools remains important for those wanting compatibility with AWS
templates.

If you care less about portability with AWS, and more about close
integration with OpenStack, you're better using HOT templates and one of:
- cloud-init directly by using an OS::Nova::Server with
  user_data_format=RAW
- cloud-init via cloud-config encapsulated in a OS::Heat::CloudConfig
  resource
- SoftwareConfig/SoftwareDeployment resources (which can integrate with
  whatever CM tool you want)

All of the above, including the heat-cfntools approach use cloud-init, in
some cases just to bootstrap another agent.

There are examples in the heat-templates repo, e.g:

https://github.com/openstack/heat-templates/blob/master/hot/software-config/example-templates

Steve