TripleO - Openstack on Openstack

TripleO is a program aimed at installing, upgrading and operating OpenStack clouds using OpenStack's own cloud facilities as the foundations - building on nova, quantum and heat to automate fleet management at datacentre scale (and scaling down to as few as 2 machines).

We gave a presentation at the portland 2013 summit about TripleO.

TripleO is raw but usable today - see our incubator for deployment instructions.

Folk working on TripleO are contributing to Nova, OpenStack Networking, Heat and Ironic to ensure they have the facilities needed to deploy to baremetal at scale. We also have a small number of projects we're shepards for ourselves:

os-apply-config - small templating layer for writing out config files.
os-refresh-config - react to heat metadata changes and send heat events
diskimage-builder - build golden disk images
tripleo-image-elements - rules for diskimage-builder for OpenStack golden images.
openstack heat templates, url to come.

Design

Our overall story is to invest in robust solid automation such that we can do continuous integration and deployment testing of a cloud at the bare metal layer, then deploy the very same tested images to production clouds using nova baremetal (now ironic), rather than any separate management stack, leading to shared expertise in both deployments in the cloud, and of the cloud. Finally, because we can setup OpenStack in a fully HA environment, we can host the baremetal cloud used to deploy OpenStack in itself, and have a fully self sustaining HA cluster. On top of that we intend to build out a solid operations story - baseline monitoring autoconfigured as the overcloud - the cloud we deploy on top of the bare-metal "under" cloud scales up.

Interoperability

A key goal of ours is to play nice with folk that already have deep investment in operational areas - such as automation via Chef/Puppet/Salt, or monitoring via icinga/assimilator etc. We're ensuring we have clean interfaces that alternative implementations can be plugged into [e.g. you can use Chef/Puppet/Salt to do the in-instance configuration of a golden TripleO disk image].