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(Application Service Catalog Design)
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Revision as of 22:37, 28 October 2013

Project Mission

The mission for this project is to provide a way to make third-party applications and services running on VMs available as self-service for OpenStack. These applications may be a simple, a single VM or complex, multi tier applications with autoscaling and self healing.

From the third-party tool developer’s perspective, the application service catalog will provide a way to publish services, including deployment rules and requirements, suggested configuration, output parameters and billing rules. It will also provide a way to track billing and usage information.

From the user’s perspective, the application service catalog will be a place to find and self-provision third-party services, integrate them into their environment, and track usage information and costs.

Rationale

The Application Service Catalog project aims to make it easier for, external developers to create services for use by OpenStack end users. In this way, these third party developers can enrich the OpenStack ecosystem to make it more attractive for users, and users can get more out of their OpenStack clusters more easily, fostering adoption of OpenStack itself.

Installing third party services and applications can be difficult in any environment, but the dynamic nature of an OpenStack environment can make this problem worse. The project is designed to solve this problem by providing an additional integration layer between third party components an OpenStack infrastructure. This integration layer makes it possible to provide both Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service from a single control plane. For users, this control plan then becomes a single interface from which they can provision an entire fully-functional cloud-based application environment.

Accessed by self-service portals, service catalogs contain a list of services from which cloud consumers select for self-provisioning. Because each service definition includes all of the information the system needs to deploy the service, users will not have to work through various IT departments in order to provision a cloud service, nor are users required to provide detailed IT specifications. They are only required to provide business and organization requirements.

In this proposal, we will look at the Service Catalog design, define the various components, and look at the various use cases involved.

Application Service Catalog Design

The service catalog makes use of existing OpenStack projects and services, as you can see in this diagram:

Application Catalog.png

The Application Service Catalog project integrates all OpenStack components directly and indirectly via Heat. The Ceilometer service will collect usage information, which the Murano-API will use during billing rules processing to calculate billing information.

The Murano API will expose API calls to manage (CRUD) services available for deployment. This API will be used by the Service admin user interface to simplify Service management.

Service Catalog components and definitions

The key components of the service catalog are:

  • Metadata service - Storage for service descriptions and service metadata, including service-related Heat templates, software configurations and provision scripts, as well as UI forms definitions

API service - Used by the UI, the API enables administrators to manipulate service metadata, developers to publish and manage services, and end-users to perform service configuration and self-provisioning. The API provides RBAC capabilities to control access to various components and services.

  • Environment control - Integration with OpenStack deployment engines such as Heat, Trove, and Savanna to perform the actual deployment of the service.
  • Billing - Works with Ceilometer usage data to prepare billing information for the deployed service. Each service can have its own billing rules, set by the developer who created it.

In evaluating this proposal, consider these definitions:

  • Environment - A logical entity for grouping services into a single deployment.
  • Service - A software component that has its own configuration and deployment scripts. A Service may use multiple VMs for deployment, such as a Galera cluster or a SQL Cluster, for example.
  • Service definition - A description of a service, which includes metadata describing how the service is to be deployed, service requirements, the service UI and so on.
  • RBAC - Role Based Access Control
  • Murano - a group of components which provides a control on service management and deployment. It is accessible via a defined endpoint, and may refer to one more more service catalog instances. For example, it may refer to a single local instance, a department tree of instances, a remote instance, or any combination of those.
  • Service catalog instance - An instance of the Murano service that hosts service catalog components and manages one or more service definitions. A service catalog instance may be local and associated with a single cloud, or remote, providing services to multiple OpenStack environments.
  • Service Developer - An individual or company that publishes a service to an application service catalog
  • End User - An individual or company attempting to self-provision a service from an application service catalog
  • Catalog Administrator - An individual or company that maintains an application service catalog and determines any relevant policies regarding its use.

Application Service Catalog Use Cases

Service Developer

The process begins when a Service Developer creates a new service and publishes it to a Murano endpoint. It will then be available within any service catalog instances defined by that Murano endpoint, depending on the policies for that instance.

Service Developers should be able to create new services by defining service metadata, describing properties and specifying all the steps necessary for deploying the service and its dependencies. The developer can create this definition from scratch or use an existing definition by extending it, similar to inheritance in the object-oriented paradigm. The Service Developer can define the external dependencies of the service. This list of dependencies defines the other services (specified by their type) that must be present in the environment when the given service is being deployed.

Consider this example. A Service Developer creates a service that provides a web application. The developer provides the name and other service properties, and specifies that the external dependencies are a web server and a database. When users want to deploy this service in an environment, they need to have a web-server service and a database service in that environment, and must be able to specify how they want to fulfill those requirements. (See the End User use cases for more information.)

The Service Developer may define additional terms of use for their Service. For example, the developer may limit its usage and extensibility (via inheritance or referencing from another service) or specify billing rules.

Another important set of parameters that the Service Developer may specify in the Service Definition are the usage metrics. These usage metrics define which aspects of the service should be monitored by Ceilometer or other monitoring tools supported by Murano when its instances are running. The Service Developer can then specify the billing rules used with those metrics, essentially defining how much usage of a service will cost the user.

[Note that this proposal is meant to define a project that provides billing information, but because different organizations have different needs, it doesn’t define actual payment methods; payment may be handled by an external component, or it may be addressed in future versions of Murano.]

A service definition is not bound to any particular OpenStack deployment or instance of Murano. The developer may create a service definition and then publish that definition in several service catalog instances, (as long as publishing is permitted by the administrator of that catalog (see below)). �

Catalog Administrator

A published service definition is managed by the catalog administrator.

Catalog administrators are the maintainers of the application service catalog. They have the ability to manually add or remove service definitions in a catalog, or act as moderators allowing or disallowing other service developers to publish their service definitions. This control can be granular or not, as the administrator chooses. For example, the administrator may specify that any new submissions must be approved before being available to any end users, or the administrator may instead choose to make services available only to the OpenStack tenant associated with the service developer until a service is approved. The administrator can also decide to make all services available to all upon submission, as in the case of a test cloud, or a small cloud in which all developers are “trusted”.

Administrators may also define their own billing rules, which will be in addition to the billing rules specified by the service developer (if they were defined). This enables catalog administrators to cover the costs involved in running and maintaining the cloud. For example, a service that requires Microsoft Windows may incur a licensing cost for the operating system; this mechanism enables the catalog administrator to recoup that cost.

Catalog administrators also configure Role-Based Access Control rules (RBAC), which define which end users (which are associated with tenants) of the cloud have access to which services in the catalog, and whether they may be directly deployed or must be approved before deployment (see End User use cases). The billing rules for a particular service may also be defined specifically for a given tenant or a given user.

End User

Finally the service is ready for the end user.

A user should be able to create environments composed of one or more available services. The process is as follows:

The user browses a list of available services and selects one or more for deployment. If a selected service has dependencies that require other services to be deployed in the same environment, the user may either select an instance of the necessary service from instances of that type that are already present in the environment, or add a new instance of that type instead. Dependencies may include other services, or they may include resources such as a floating IP address or license key. Each service added to the environment must be properly configured; the user is prompted to provide all required properties, and the input is validated according to the rules defined in each service definition. When the user has finished configuring the environment, he or she can deploy the environment -- if he or she has the appropriate permissions. (See below.) Deployment of the environment means that instances are created, services are deployed, and all required configuration actions take place.

In some environments, it will be more appropriate for end users to submit their deployments to IT as a ticket. The IT department can then sanity-check the definitions, determine whether they are appropriate, and approve, modify, or deny the deployment. If the request is approved or modified, the IT department can then initiate the deployment, rather than the user.

Users can browse any deployed environments for which they have permissions, and inspect their state. Inspection includes the ability to determine which services are running on which nodes, how the services are configured, and so on. Users can modify service settings, add new services or remove existing ones, validate the changes (i.e. check that all the required properties are set to valid values, all the service dependencies exist and so on), and redeploy the environment by propagating these changes into the Cloud. The user can also inspect the usage metrics of the services running in his or her environments, and see billable activities and the total amount of money spent for a particular service.

Services Examples

  • RDS and NoSQL databases provided by Trove or deployed by custom deployment scripts.
  • Hadoop Cluster provided by Savana.
  • OpenShift PaaS Cluster provisioned through Heat
  • MS SQL Cluster deployed by Murano workflows
  • IIS Server Farm deployed by Murano workflows
  • File Share (SMB or NFS) deployed by Murano
  • Chef Server or Puppet Master node installed my Murano workflows
  • Nagios or Zabbix monitoring managed by Murano workflows