I gave this talk at the OpenStack Austin Meetup on June 20, 2016. The talk covers the reasons why OpenStack-Ansible exists and the value that it brings for production OpenStack deployments.

1. Flexible, simple deployments
with OpenStack-Ansible
OpenStack Austin Meetup - June 20th, 2016
Major Hayden | major.io | @majorhayden

2. Agenda
1. About me
2. The big question
3. Why Ansible?
4. Why OpenStack-Ansible?
5. Get involved!

3. About me
Major Hayden
Principal Architect, Rackspace
At Rackspace since 2006
Contributor to OpenStack
and the Fedora Project
I am addicted to
buying domain names
(please don’t give me ideas)

4. We seriously needed
another way to
deploy OpenStack
clouds?

5. “Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that
we’ve all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB?”
https://xkcd.com/927/
STANDARDS

6. Different use cases
demand different
deployment
methods.

7. What our customers wanted
“I want to focus on what
we deploy on our cloud,
not how we deploy it.
I want to lean on
someone else’s
experience.”
“We want to add
hardware on an as-
needed basis.
I want to expand my
cloud without
downtime.”

8. What our customers didn’t want
“Don’t tell me I need
downtime to change a
configuration option.
I want my cloud to be
flexible for my needs.”
“Don’t tell me to ‘lift
and shift’ my
workloads.
Upgrades should
be easy.”

9. Existing
deployment
methods had
limitations
Rigid configuration
Upgrade challenges
No operators in the community
Not coordinated
Lack of an overall direction

10. The foundation was
set for something
entirely different.

11. Why Ansible?

12. Highly extensible
Each task does one action
Tasks are grouped into roles
Roles are tied together with playbooks

13. Simple variable scope
Every role or task can have a default
Additional variables per environment
Deployers can override all of these variables easily

14. Dependencies make sense
If you can read top-down, you understand Ansible’s dependencies

15. Very little baggage
No daemons or agents
No clients or servers
Everything uses ssh
Use your existing keys, users, and auth mechanisms (like Kerberos!)

16. Why OpenStack-Ansible?

17. Extensible collection of roles
A backbone of playbooks that links multiple roles together
Each role deploys an OpenStack service
Opinionated defaults are set in each role

18. OpenStack-Ansible is
built by operators,
for operators

19. Isolation
Each service deploys into a different container
Each service gets unique message queue and database credentials
Each service queries different databases and message queue virtual hosts

20. Coordination
Every change is tested as part of the whole stack
If a keystone change breaks nova, automated testing will fail
Deprecated configurations and imports are handled gracefully

21. Documentation
Lots of installation documentation and reference guides
Real-world use cases and integrations

22. Growing, diverse community
Over 2,700 commits from 30 companies
Used to deploy the OSIC cluster (over 2,000 nodes)
* Newton mid-cycle is in San Antonio in August!

23. Deploy, maintain,
and upgrade with ease

24. Maintain
Upgrade
Deploy to one host, 100 hosts, or
1,000 hosts
High availability is built-in
Control over quantity and location
of Openstack services
Comes with opinionated defaults
from OpenStack operators
Deploy

25. Maintain
Upgrade
Change configurations with little
or no downtime
Rebuild any container quickly
after a failure or disruption
Add, remove or replace control
plane nodes as needed
Comprehensive host security
hardening
Deploy

26. Maintain
Upgrade
Upgrading between and within
major releases is a first class
feature
Services are carefully upgraded
along with database migrations
Deprecations are handled
gracefully
Deploy

27. What about security?

28. OpenStack-Ansible has a security role
Applies 200+ security configurations
on hosts and virtual machines
Follows the guidelines from the DISA STIG
Lots of auditor-friendly documentation
Supports Ubuntu 14.04/16.04, CentOS 7
and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
See the OpenStack Summit talk!
https://goo.gl/iyywZD

29. Get involved

30. What’s next?
Newton release
Ubuntu 16.04 support
Multi-arch support (PPCLE)
Xen and PowerVM support
Improved testing

31. Join us for the
Newton mid-cycle meeting
in San Antonio:
August 10-12, 2016

32. Join our community
Freenode IRC: #openstack-ansible
Mailing list: openstack-dev@lists.rackspace.com
(use the [openstack-ansible] tag in the subject line)
Code: https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible
Docs: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/openstack-ansible/

33. Thank you!
Major Hayden
@majorhayden
major.io

34. Photo credits
Title slide: Miles Bintz (Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/milesbintz/4366494947
Construction crane: Richard Carter (Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/richard_carter/6816885264/
Lock on old door: Denise Krebs (Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsdkrebs/13006945815/
Alamo: Nan Palmero (Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/nanpalmero/15442494764/
Roadway at night: Paulo Valdivieso (Flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/p_valdivieso/14908384223/
All other photos are provided courtesy of Rackspace.