On 28/10/14 21:23 +0100, Philip Cheong wrote:
Hi all,

In preparation of the OpenStack Summit in Paris next week, I'm hoping to speak
to some people in the OpenStack foundation about the benefits of a partnership
with Hashicorp, who make fantastic tools like Vagrant and Packer (and others).

As a n00b aspiring to become an OpenStack contributor, the variety of Vagrant
devstack environments is pretty overwhelming. It appears to me that it really
depends on what project you are contributing to, which denotes which devstack
you should use. The ones I have tried take a long time (45 mins+) to provision
from scratch. 

One aspect which I am acutely aware of is developer productivity and 45 minutes
is a lot of time. Packer was designed to help alleviate bottleneck, and
Vagrantcloud has inbuilt support for the versioning of Vagrant boxes. It would
be a pretty straight forward exercise to use Packer to do a daily (or however
often) build of a devstack box and upload it to Vagrantcloud for developers to
download. With a decent internet connection that time would be significantly
less than 45 minutes.

I would really like to think that this community should also be able to come to
a consensus over what to include in a "standard" devstack. That there currently
seems to be many different flavours cannot help with issues of fragmentation
between so many different moving parts to build an OpenStack environment.

Another big issue that I hope to address with the foundation, is the
integration of Hashicorp's tools with OpenStack. 

The various Vagrant plugins to add OpenStack as a provider is a mess. There is
one specific for Rackspace who have a different Keystone API, and at least 3
others for the vanilla OpenStack:
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-rackspace
https://github.com/ggiamarchi/vagrant-openstack-provider
https://github.com/cloudbau/vagrant-openstack-plugin
https://github.com/FlaPer87/vagrant-openstack

I'm pretty sure mine doesn't even work any more, I don't even know
ruby ;)

I do see a value in having a vagrant-openstack provider but I don't
think we should pick one and mark it as blessed. We're trying very
hard to move away from 'blessing' projecs, at the very least depend
less on it.

Anyone should feel free to create the provider on stackforge and
maintain it. What would be even better is to have Hashicorp itself
creating and maintaining this provider.

Cheers,
Flavio


The significance of not having an "official" provider, for one example, is when
you use Packer to build an image in OpenStack and try to post-process it into a
Vagrant box, it bombs with this error:


   ==> openstack: Running post-processor: vagrant
   Build 'openstack' errored: 1 error(s) occurred:

   * Post-processor failed: Unknown artifact type, can't build box:
   mitchellh.openstack


Because Packer doesn't know what Vagrant expects the provider to be, as
explained here.

In my opinion this a pretty big issue holding back the wider acceptance of
OpenStack. When I am at a customer and introduce them to tools like Vagrant and
Packer and how well they work with AWS, I still avoid the conversation about
OpenStack when I would really love to put them on our (Elastx's) public cloud.

What say you? Could I get a +1 from those who see this as a worthwhile issue?

Cheers,

Phil.
--
Philip Cheong
Elastx | Public and Private PaaS
email: [email protected]
office: +46 8 557 728 10
mobile: +46 702 870 814
twitter: @Elastx
http://elastx.se

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--
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco

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