OpenStack

Since there was only one Oslo session and a couple of Designate sessions that I was able to attend, this update is going to be a bit of a grab-bag of topics. Hopefully I have some interesting thoughts on them. :-)

This is an announcement that we recently merged a new feature to oslo.config for validating the contents of config files. This has been an oft-requested feature, but in the past it was difficult to implement because config opts are registered dynamically at runtime and there's no good way to know for sure when all of them are present.

The time has come to declare a 1.0 version for OVB. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. OVB has been stable for quite a while
2. It's time to start dropping support for ancient behaviors/clouds

This was the first repeat OpenStack Summit location for me. While there have been repeat locations in the past, I wasn't at the first Summit at any of those locations. I think that means I'm getting old. :-)

There was a lot that had changed, and also a lot that stayed the same. The Vancouver Convention Center is still a fantastic venue, with plenty of space for sessions. And although I did attend all of the Oslo sessions, just like last time, we didn't over-schedule Oslo this time so I had a chance to attend some non-Oslo sessions as well. Since I'm also focusing on Designate these days, I made sure to catch all of those sessions, even the one at 5:30 PM on Thursday when everyone was a bit tired and ready to leave. And it was good - there was useful information in that presentation. I felt more productive at this Summit than last time, which is certainly a good thing.

With the intro out of the way, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of the sessions I attended.

Background

At long last, OVB has reached the goal we set for it way back when it was more idea than reality. The plan was to come up with a system where we could test baremetal deployment against OpenStack instances in an arbitrary cloud. That would allow something like TripleO CI to scale, for all practical purposes, infinitely. For years this wasn't possible because OVB required some configuration and/or hacks that were not appropriate for production clouds, which limited it to use in specific CI-oriented clouds. Theoretically it has been possible to use OVB on normal clouds for a couple of years now, but in practice public clouds were either running OpenStack versions that were too old or didn't expose the necessary features. Fortunately, this is no longer true.

About a year ago I got fed up with all the dynamic Zuul status pages (like this one). They're extremely heavyweight pages that make my browser grind almost constantly and there's no way to disable the auto-refresh while you're looking through the list. At least not that I found, and when I asked on openstack-dev the responses agreed.

So I wrote my own.

I was asked to look into integrating Ansible Tower with TripleO a while back. It actually wasn't that difficult to do, but I've finally gotten around to recording a demo video showing how. In this post I will also provide a brief overview of how I installed Ansible Tower.

If you've looked at the OVB repo or docs recently you may notice that there have been some significant changes. This is a good news-good news situation: the changes are backwards compatible and if you use the new configuration method it's much easier to deploy with some of the more advanced options in OVB.

So you're writing a Python application and you want to talk to an OpenStack service. Or maybe even multiple services. A quick Google turns up something like python-novaclient, which provides a way to create an instance of a Nova client in Python. Great! We're done here, right? Not so fast, my friend.

Just a quick update on the TripleO Network Isolation Template Generator. A few new features have been added recently that may be of interest.