Andy McCrae presented on using Ansible to deploy and automate OpenStack. He discussed how OSAD (OpenStack Ansible Deployment) was created by Rackspace to solve common deployment, maintenance, scalability and stability problems with OpenStack. OSAD uses LXC containers, a source-based installation of OpenStack and a multi-master architecture orchestrated by Ansible. It aims to provide a stable, scalable deployment of OpenStack without proprietary components or out of date packages. McCrae then demonstrated OSAD and took questions from the audience.

1. Andy McCrae
Twitter: @andymccrae
Github: andymcc
Using Ansible to Deploy and Automate OpenStack
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Who am I?

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@robertcathey
Cloud infra is hard. OpenStack is cloud infra.
OpenStack is hard. This is news, apparently.
“
”

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Why are we here?
In late 2013, the Rackspace Private Cloud team set out to solve our common
deployment, maintenance, scalability, and stability problems.

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Distribution packaging of OpenStack
● Out of date packages
● Out of band configuration
● Packages include proprietary patches
● Time to bug resolution is longer than it should
● Broken dependencies

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Legacy architecture does not scale
● Almost all deployment systems reference an architecture that
suffers from the “controller 1 controller 2” model
● VIP failover for OpenStack supporting services bound to break and
when it does it’ll break spectacularly!

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What we devised
A source-based installation of OpenStack, built within LXC containers, using a
multi-master architecture orchestrated and deployed via Ansible.

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Why Ansible?
● Community engagement
● Orchestration
● Almost no code
● Low barrier to entry
● Crazy powerful, stupid simple

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Why containers?
● LXC ≈ More bare metal
● Compatible with many networking architectures
● Supports an LVM backend
● Stable

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What is OSAD?
OSAD == OpenStack Ansible Deployment
● Uses LXC containers to isolate components and services
● Deploys OpenStack from upstream sources
● Runs on Ubuntu 14.04
● Built for production
● No proprietary secrete sauce
○ But you could bolt on as much as you want
● Created following the KISS principle

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● All Ansible tasks and roles target multiple nodes, even if that number is a multiple of one (1)
○ EVERYTHING is tagged!
● Process separation on infrastructure components (controller nodes)
○ Microservice-like, where it makes sense
OSAD architecture

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● Galera multi-master cluster
● RabbitMQ with mirrored queues and deterministic sorting of the master queues
● Pip Package index build for your environment stored within your environment
OSAD infrastructure components

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● OSAD does not know about the “all in one” deployment
○ LXC enables the base system to deploy a multi-node cloud even with only one physical node
○ An AIO in our gate job emulates a 32 node cloud
● Neutron with the Linux Bridge agent offer stability and supportability
○ Open vSwitch is feature-full but Linux Bridge “just works”™
OSAD scale

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Community project
● We support Juno and Icehouse but the code contains Rackspace-isms
● Kilo is our first “community” release of OSAD
● 41 contributors presently in the project
○ Not all Rackers

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● Deployer experience: Ansible
● Vanilla OpenStack: Source-based installation
● Scalability: Built within LXC containers
● Stability: Obviously!
OSAD and what we’re about

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OpenStack® Architecture
KEYSTONE
IDENTITY
GLANCE
IMAGE
MANAGEMENT
NOVA
COMPUTE LAYER SWIFT
OBJECT STORE
CINDER
BLOCK STORAGE
NEUTRON
NETWORKING
HORIZON
DASHBOARD/UI
CEILOMETER
TELEMETRY
TROVE
DBaaS
HEAT
ORCHESTRATION

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OpenStack-ansible-deployment (OSAD) Sample Architecture
Public Network
Management Network
VM Network
Storage Network

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Demo

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Q & A
Twitter: @andymccrae
IRC: andymccr
Email: andrew.mccrae@rackspace.co.uk
Github: andymcc