OpenStack

I was recently copied on an email from a team with a lot of new contributors to TripleO that was wondering if there was any sort of tips or guidelines for writing specs. My initial reaction was "The spec templates tell you how to write them." Then I realized that if you haven't ever written a spec before you may not know that. So, with that said, here are some of my thoughts on spec writing:

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and opinions only. This is not endorsed by TripleO or anyone else in the OpenStack community. I'm just writing it in the hopes that it will be helpful.

Just a quick note about the latest OVB news. First is that the docs are no longer one big flat README file. This should make them much more consumable. The shiny new docs are being published at Read The Docs.

You may also note that there are some new bits in these docs. Some of these (like QuintupleO deployments) are not really new but were previously undocumented. Others (heterogeneous deployments) are actually pretty new. There are more details about both in the docs. As always, let me know if you have any feedback.

I've been meaning to do something like this for about 3 years and finally got around to it. It's a video series in which I go over a number of common Git and Gerrit activities for doing OpenStack development. As I mention in the intro, this isn't intended to be Baby's First Git/OpenStack Tutorial (although I do go over some pretty basic stuff) because there are other resources for that. What it is intended to cover is the stuff I periodically see questions about from other OpenStack developers. I'm hoping it will be helpful for new and even more experienced developers.

There are times where it can be handy to test an undercloud install in a standalone VM. For example, if you're working on installing a new service, or upgrading the undercloud, many times you can make progress in a lighter weight single VM environment. Obviously the undercloud won't be usable for anything if it's not part of a full virt environment, but you can at least check that a service is running at the end of the install and do some basic sanity checks.

I've finally gotten around to recording a demo of the current iteration of my tool to generate TripleO network isolation templates. You can watch the demo video (in which I say "umm". A lot. Sorry.) or check out the tool itself. There are also some templates generated with the tool if you want examples to start from.

I had hoped to have this ready before the Austin summit, but...it didn't happen. Even so, this is the latest big advancement in OVB. It's now possible to do a baremetal-style deployment to OpenStack instances in a completely unmodified OpenStack cloud. Here's video proof: OVB on a stock OpenStack cloud.

This is going to be a bit of a different summit recap than my previous ones. Since Steve Hardy has already posted an excellent summary of the major TripleO topics from this summit, I'm not going to duplicate all of that here.

Instead, this will be a more personally focused post, wherein I reflect on my experience at this summit and how it compared to previous ones. If that kind of navel-gazing sounds incredibly uninteresting, then you might want to pull the rip cord now. :-)

One of the first things a new user of TripleO has to do is write a configuration file for their undercloud. While this is not as complex as, say, writing a nova.conf, there is still some level of difficulty due to the need for consistency between different options, and some less than ideal overlap/inconsistency between the options themselves. In the interest of easing new users' introduction to TripleO as much as possible, I've written a tool to help create undercloud.conf.

I did a post in the past about using caching and local mirrors to speed up TripleO development, but at this point TripleO has changed so much that pretty much everything in that post is completely outdated, so I thought it was time for another one about my current caching setup.

Status

It's been a while since my last OVB update, and I've been meaning to post a network diagram for quite a while now so I figured I would combine the two.

In general, the news is good. Not only have I continued to use OVB for my primary TripleO development environment, but I also know of at least a couple other people who have done successful deployments with OVB. There is also some serious planning going on around how to switch the TripleO CI cloud over to OVB to make it more flexible and maintainable.