https://dmsimard.com/categories/openstack/ Recent content in openstack on System Administration, Hosting, Cloud and technologies in between Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/10/08/ansiblefest-2018-community-project-highlights/ Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/10/08/ansiblefest-2018-community-project-highlights/ With two days of AnsibleFest instead of one this time around, we had 100% more time to talk about Ansible things ! I got to attend great sessions, learn a bunch of things, chat and exchange war stories about Ansible, ARA, Zuul, Tower and many other things. It was awesome and I wanted to take the time to share a bit about some of the great Ansible community projects that were featured during the event. https://dmsimard.com/2018/05/03/ara-records-ansible-0.15-has-been-released/ Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/05/03/ara-records-ansible-0.15-has-been-released/ I was recently writing that ARA was open to limited development for the stable release in order to improve the performance for larger scale users. This limited development is the result of this 0.15.0 release. The #OpenStack community runs over 300,000 continuous integration jobs with #Ansible every month with the help of the awesome Zuul. Learn more about scaling ARA reports with @dmsimard https://t.co/l8zFXHqhhc — OpenStack (@OpenStack) April 18, 2018 Changelog for ARA Records Ansible 0. https://dmsimard.com/2018/04/09/scaling-ara-to-a-million-ansible-playbooks-a-month/ Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/04/09/scaling-ara-to-a-million-ansible-playbooks-a-month/ The OpenStack community runs over 300 000 CI jobs with Ansible every month with the help of the awesome Zuul. It even provides ARA reports for ARA’s integration test jobs in a sort-of nested way. Zuul’s Ansible ends up installing Ansible and ARA. It makes my brain hurt sometimes… but in an awesome way. As a core contributor of the infrastructure team there, I get to witness issues and get a lot of feedback directly from the users. https://dmsimard.com/2018/02/24/awesome-things-in-software-engineering-open-source/ Sat, 24 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/02/24/awesome-things-in-software-engineering-open-source/ This is part of a blog series highlighting awesome things in software engineering because not everything has to be depressing, about bugs, vulnerabilities, outages or deadlines. If you’d like to collaborate and write about awesome things in software engineering too, let’s chat: reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn. What’s this blog series about ? Between you and me, software engineering isn’t always fun. You’re not always working on what you like. https://dmsimard.com/2018/02/23/rebranding-ansible-run-analysis-to-ara-records-ansible/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2018/02/23/rebranding-ansible-run-analysis-to-ara-records-ansible/ So I got an idea recently… Let’s rebrand Ansible Run Analysis to ARA records Ansible. If you’d like to review and comment on the code change, you can do so here: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/547245/. Why ? I watched the last season of Sillicon Valley recently. The series, while exaggerated, provides a humorous look at the world of startups. I don’t have any plans on creating a startup but I love that it makes you think about things like needing a clever name or how you would do a proper “elevator” pitch to get funding. https://dmsimard.com/2017/11/29/come-try-a-real-openstack-queens-deployment/ Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/11/29/come-try-a-real-openstack-queens-deployment/ The RDO project community provides vanilla RPM packages and mirrors for deploying OpenStack on the CentOS or RHEL linux distributions. The packages provided by RDO can be deployed manually or through different OpenStack installers such as TripleO, Kolla, Packstack and Puppet-OpenStack. OpenStack-Ansible also relies on RDO for dependencies although it currently installs OpenStack projects from source. At each OpenStack development cycle milestone, the RDO community holds a test day. This gives the opportunity to the greater community of OpenStack users, developers and operators to try out the latest and the greatest of OpenStack with people around to help on IRC in the #rdo channel. https://dmsimard.com/2017/11/22/status-update-ara-1.0/ Wed, 22 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/11/22/status-update-ara-1.0/ Back in August, I posted about what was the roadmap for ARA 1.0 and why it was a very important milestone for the project. We’re now almost in December and I said there would likely be a beta version out by September. “What’s going on ?", one might ask… A fair question. There’s definitely been progress and I could’ve been doing a better job at communicating updates other than the tweet from time to time. https://dmsimard.com/2017/08/27/new-ways-of-reaching-the-ara-community/ Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/08/27/new-ways-of-reaching-the-ara-community/ More and more users requested other ways of reaching the ARA community and I’ve finally given in ! Until now, the only way of getting in touch was through IRC and I understand that, in 2017, IRC is not for everyone. Seamless communication across IRC, Slack and Discord That’s right, you can now reach us through Slack and Discord. Both are linked to IRC so messages sent to one will be relayed automatically to the others. https://dmsimard.com/2017/08/16/whats-coming-in-ara-1.0/ Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/08/16/whats-coming-in-ara-1.0/ Not long ago, I wrote that ARA: Ansible Run Analysis had it’s first birthday. It was an important milestone and it was a great opportunity to reflect back on where the project was coming from and think about what we needed to do in the future. Just for fun, let’s look at what I had written back in May to summarize what was probably coming: Python 3 compatibility This is done and was shipped in ARA 0. https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/08/ara-is-one-year-old-a-look-back-at-the-past-year/ Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/08/ara-is-one-year-old-a-look-back-at-the-past-year/ ARA is one year old, happy birthday ARA ! ARA’s come a long way since the early prototypes. The latest version, 0.13, looks pretty awesome. It even caught the eye of Michael DeHaan, the author of Ansible ! This looks pretty awesome (maybe run on a Jenkins box?) https://t.co/qvd3aYE7n9 — laserllama (@laserllama) May 6, 2017 Let’s go back in time to look at the humble beginnings of the project and some of the important milestones that marked it’s history this past year. https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/05/ara-ansible-run-analysis-0-13-is-out-and-its-awesome/ Fri, 05 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/05/05/ara-ansible-run-analysis-0-13-is-out-and-its-awesome/ I’m excited to announce the release of ARA: Ansible Run Analysis 0.13.0! ARA 0.13.0 is available on PyPi or from source on GitHub. I’m also happy to announce that ARA 0.13.0 will be the first version of ARA packaged for Fedora and CentOS EPEL. Stay tuned in the near future to hear when the packages will be available. Wait, what’s ARA ? ARA is an Ansible callback plugin that records your playbook runs, wherever it is. https://dmsimard.com/2017/03/12/an-even-better-ansible-reporting-interface-with-ara-0-12/ Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/03/12/an-even-better-ansible-reporting-interface-with-ara-0-12/ Not even a month ago, I announced the release of ARA 0.11 with a bunch of new features and improvements. Today, I’m back with some more great news and an awesome new release, ARA 0.12(.3) ! That’s right, 0.12.3! Due to the nature of this new release, I wanted to be sure to get feedback from the users before getting the word out. We got a lot of great input! This allowed us to fix some bugs and significantly improve the performance. https://dmsimard.com/2017/02/13/announcing-the-ara-0.11-release/ Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2017/02/13/announcing-the-ara-0.11-release/ We’re on the road to version 1.0.0 and we’re getting closer: introducing the release of version 0.11! Four new contributors (!), 55 commits since 0.10 and 112 files changed for a total of 2,247 additions and 939 deletions. New features, more stability, better documentation and better test coverage. The changelog since 0.10.5 New feature: ARA UI and Ansible version (ARA UI is running with) are now shown at the top right New feature: The Ansible version a playbook was run is now stored and displayed in the playbook reports New feature: New command: “ara generate junit”: generates a junit xml stream of all task results New feature: ara_record now supports two new types: “list” and “dict”, each rendered appropriately in the UI UI: Add ARA logo and favicon UI: Left navigation bar was removed (top navigation bar will be further improved in future versions) Bugfix: CLI commands could sometimes fail when trying to format as JSON or YAML Bugfix: Database and logs now properly default to ARA_DIR if ARA_DIR is changed Bugfix: When using non-ascii characters (ex: äëö) in playbook files, web application or static generation could fail Bugfix: Trying to use ara_record to record non strings (ex: lists or dicts) could fail Bugfix: Ansible config: ‘tmppath’ is now a ‘type_value’ instead of a boolean Deprecation: The “ara generate” command was deprecated and moved to “ara generate html” Deprecation: The deprecated callback location, ara/callback has been removed. https://dmsimard.com/2016/12/01/ara-0.10-the-biggest-release-yet-is-out/ Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/12/01/ara-0.10-the-biggest-release-yet-is-out/ 19 commits, 59 changed files, 2,404 additions and 588 deletions… and more than a month’s on and off work. 0.10 is out ! Where to get it ? Get started easily by installing and configuring ARA. I’m excited to tell you about this new release ! Here’s a few highlights ! An improved web application browsing experience A lot of work has gone into the browsing experience: less clicks, more information, faster. https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/29/recorded-presentations-from-openstack-canada-day/ Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/29/recorded-presentations-from-openstack-canada-day/ OpenStack Days are sort of local mini one-day OpenStack summits. Not everyone can travel to the OpenStack summits for a number of reasons so OpenStack days are great for that since there are many across a wide range of countries. The first one in Canada was in Montreal, at an awesome venue: the Notman house. There’s a lot of history about the place, definitely look it up - it’s very interesting ! https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/09/visualizing-kolla-ansible-playbooks-with-ara/ Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/11/09/visualizing-kolla-ansible-playbooks-with-ara/ Kolla is an OpenStack deployment tool that’s growing in popularity right now. An OpenStack installation by Kolla was even showcased by Chris Hoge and Mark Collier in one of the main keynotes at the recent Barcelona OpenStack Summit. Installing OpenStack is complex Installing and configuring OpenStack is no easy task – Kolla tackles this challenge with the help of Docker containers that are deployed with Ansible. This translates into quite a few playbooks, lots of plays, many more tasks and especially lots of data to parse through when trying to understand what is going on. https://dmsimard.com/2016/08/04/openstack-operators-developers-users-its-your-summit-vote/ Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/08/04/openstack-operators-developers-users-its-your-summit-vote/ Once again, the OpenStack Summit is nigh and this time it’ll be in Barcelona. The OpenStack Summit event is an opportunity for Operators, Developers and Users alike to gather, discuss and learn about OpenStack. What we know is that there’s going to be keynotes, design sessions for developers to hack on things and operator sessions for discussing and exchanging around the challenges of operating OpenStack. We also know there’s going to be a bunch of presentations on a wide range of topics from the OpenStack community. https://dmsimard.com/2016/07/13/improving-rdo-packaging-testing-coverage/ Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/07/13/improving-rdo-packaging-testing-coverage/ DLRN builds packages and generates repositories in which these packages will be hosted. It is the tool that is developed and used by the RDO community to provide the repositories on trunk.rdoproject.org. It continuously builds packages for every commit for projects packaged in RDO. RDO is completely open source and community driven: anyone can submit patches to improve RDO packaging. When someone submits a patch for review on review.rdoproject.org, we have a gate job called “DLRN-rpmbuild” that will run DLRN to see if the package builds successfully. https://dmsimard.com/2016/06/07/ara-one-month-and-200-commits-later/ Tue, 07 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/06/07/ara-one-month-and-200-commits-later/ On May 21st, I wrote a blog post about ARA, an idea to store, browse and troubleshoot Ansible playbook runs. Let’s rewind a bit further back in time. On May 6th, I got tired of trying to make our human_log callback write user friendly HTML files. I simply wasn’t happy with my attempts… I’m a big fan of the UNIX philosophy: Do one thing and do it well. Trying to hack HTML writing into human_log didn’t feel like that at all. https://dmsimard.com/2016/05/21/ara-an-idea-to-store-browse-and-troubleshoot-ansible-playbook-runs/ Sat, 21 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/05/21/ara-an-idea-to-store-browse-and-troubleshoot-ansible-playbook-runs/ The context Ansible can be used for a lot of things and it’s grown pretty popular for managing servers and their configuration. In the RDO and OpenStack communities, Ansible is heavily used to deploy or test OpenStack through Continuous Integration (CI). Projects like TripleO-Quickstart, WeIRDO, OpenStack-Ansible or Zuul v3 are completely driven by Ansible. In the world of automated continuous integration, it’s not uncommon to have hundreds, if not thousands of jobs running every day for testing, building, compiling, deploying and so on. https://dmsimard.com/2016/05/15/what-did-everyone-do-for-the-mitaka-release-of-openstack/ Sun, 15 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/05/15/what-did-everyone-do-for-the-mitaka-release-of-openstack/ Just what did everyone do for the Mitaka OpenStack release ? RDO community liaison Rich Bowen went to find out. He interviewed some developers and engineers that worked on OpenStack and RDO throughout the Mitaka cycle and asked them what they did and what they were up to for the Newton cycle. It was definitely a good idea and I hope we do the same retrospective for Newton ! Here’s a quick summary of who participated and what they talked about. https://dmsimard.com/2016/03/02/openstack-montreal-a-talk-about-ci-in-openstack-and-rdo/ Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/03/02/openstack-montreal-a-talk-about-ci-in-openstack-and-rdo/ OpenStack Montreal is a meetup that happens around every 2 months in Montreal. We talk and discuss about different OpenStack topics with interests for developers, users and operators. If you’d like to keep up with the event, attend (or present a topic!), please subscribe to the mailing list to be notified when something’s going on. Meanwhile, I presented a talk at the last event in February to talk about CI in and RDO, it was tons of fun. https://dmsimard.com/2016/03/02/packstack-gates-against-itself/ Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2016/03/02/packstack-gates-against-itself/ TL;DR Today I made an announcement on both openstack-dev and rdo-list that Packstack was going to gate against itself. Until now Packstack essentially only gated against pep8. From now on it will test itself with a self-installed Tempest with three different configuration scenarios in the upstream OpenStack gate. Additionally, we will use these new tests in the RDO CI pipeline to improve our test coverage. Pretty exciting. There is no long version, that was a joke. https://dmsimard.com/2015/12/07/thinking-outside-the-box-and-outside-the-gate-to-improve-openstack-and-rdo/ Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2015/12/07/thinking-outside-the-box-and-outside-the-gate-to-improve-openstack-and-rdo/ I recently explained how testing everything in OpenStack is hard. The reality is that the RDO community has finite resources. Testing everything is not just hard, it’s time consuming and expensive. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tackle this and experimented around ways to improve our test coverage in this context. How can we improve testing coverage for RDO ? Upstream OpenStack does a good job of testing things as much as it can. https://dmsimard.com/2015/12/04/testing-openstack-is-hard/ Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2015/12/04/testing-openstack-is-hard/ I joined Red Hat last September to help the RDO community ship a quality OpenStack package distribution faster. Previously, I worked for Internap, where I helped operate their cloud. There’s a lot of challenges involved in deploying and supporting a large scale OpenStack public cloud. At Internap, we did extensive integration testing with a representation of our production cloud in development environments. Looking back, we were really just testing limited configurations: we only tested what we were deploying. https://dmsimard.com/2015/07/18/migrating-glance-images-to-a-different-backend/ Sat, 18 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2015/07/18/migrating-glance-images-to-a-different-backend/ The use case This isn’t exactly far-fetched but nothing seems to do it out of the box: migrate Glance images from a backend to the other. We’re in the process of moving our Glance default store to Swift, it simply scales infinitely better than the file backend. Now, changing the default store does just that: change the default store. It makes it so the newly created images will be uploaded to the new store - it doesn’t do anything for the existing images. https://dmsimard.com/2015/06/28/openstackclient-is-better-than-i-thought/ Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2015/06/28/openstackclient-is-better-than-i-thought/ When openstackclient came out, I was not a believer. I thought.. Great, a new standard (cue XKCD), and I joked about it. I had been using the ordinary CLI clients like novaclient, keystoneclient and so on. Over time, I guess I got used to their strengths, weaknesses and their quirks for better or for worse. We’ve started wrapping around Openstackclient in the different puppet modules for Openstack. Since Openstackclient provides CSV output, it makes it easy for us to parse the command outputs. https://dmsimard.com/2014/09/29/s3ql-a-filesystem-over-http-with-openstack-swift/ Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/09/29/s3ql-a-filesystem-over-http-with-openstack-swift/ Swift and Object Storage Swift is Openstack‘s Object Storage project. At a very high level, I like to present Object Storage as a filesystem accessible through a set of APIs, often directly by HTTP. Object Storage backends are usually built from the ground up to be resilient, failure tolerant, highly available and provide mechanisms to ensure data redundancy and security. Object Storage is the secret sauce that hides behind interfaces such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. https://dmsimard.com/2014/09/28/finding-the-right-openstack-provider/ Sun, 28 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/09/28/finding-the-right-openstack-provider/ How to find a great Openstack provider. Isn’t that a good question ? The Openstack foundation thinks so, too. That’s why it announced the release of the Openstack Marketplace at the last Openstack summit in Atlanta. It’s definitely a step in the right direction towards helping users find trustworthy providers of Openstack services. To be listed, providers must meet basic requirements that are verified by the foundation. The great thing is that the marketplace is not limited to public or private cloud offerings, you’ll also be able to find offers for training or consulting, too. https://dmsimard.com/2014/08/12/send-your-encrypted-duplicity-backups-to-a-swift-object-storage/ Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/08/12/send-your-encrypted-duplicity-backups-to-a-swift-object-storage/ Duplicity is a Python utility that backups your stuff, encrypts it and allows you to upload them away using as little bandwidth as possible using the rsync algorithm. Cost effectiveness and security aren’t things that especially come to mind when thinking about sending your backups to the cloud. However, as the cost of mass storage and bandwidth goes down, so does the pricing of cloud Object Storage. As far as security is concerned, your backups are encrypted locally by Duplicity before being uploaded. https://dmsimard.com/2014/06/28/deploy-virtual-machines-in-openstack-with-vagrant/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/06/28/deploy-virtual-machines-in-openstack-with-vagrant/ Vagrant is awesome as part of a development workflow. It allows you to leverage virtualization to create automated, repeatable environments. If you find yourself doing the same bootstrapping/deployments often, you’re probably using shell scripts or configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef already. That’s great, but that doesn’t take care of actually creating/installing your server - and that’s where Vagrant comes in the picture. Oh, and you get to keep your current shell scripts or other configuration means because once Vagrant is done creating your server, it can launch them. https://dmsimard.com/2014/06/21/a-use-case-of-tengine-a-drop-in-replacement-and-fork-of-nginx/ Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/06/21/a-use-case-of-tengine-a-drop-in-replacement-and-fork-of-nginx/ I’ve always been a fan of nginx, it was love at first sight. I tend to use nginx first and foremost as a reverse proxy server for web content and applications. This means that nginx sends your request to backend servers and forwards you their response. Some examples of backend servers I use: php5-fpm for PHP gunicorn or wsgi for Python PSGI/Plack or fastcgi for Perl Now, the cool thing is that these backend servers are good at what they do: serve code and applications written in specific languages. https://dmsimard.com/2014/05/02/no-network-on-ubuntu-14-04-cloud-image-with-cloud-init/ Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/05/02/no-network-on-ubuntu-14-04-cloud-image-with-cloud-init/ I had this weird problem while testing the brand new Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty in my Openstack environment. Same image, same flavors, same specifications - sometimes even the same nova-compute host. I spawn 20 VMs and maybe 50% of the VMs spawned wouldn’t ping. And now, it’s not like I tinkered a lot with the image at all. It’s provided directly from Ubuntu from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/trusty/. I started investigating… No relevant information provided by logs of nova-api, neutron, nova-compute. https://dmsimard.com/2014/03/15/openstack-swift-ceph-openstack-montreal/ Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2014/03/15/openstack-swift-ceph-openstack-montreal/ The second meetup of Openstack Montreal, in collaboration with iWeb, Enovance and Savoir-faire Linux, will happen at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) monday march 17th. It’s with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation from my colleague Rafael Rosa (@rafaelrosafu) to talk about Ceph in the context of Openstack. Our friends at Enovance will be talking about Swift, the object storage project in Openstack. Should definitely be fun, it will in fact be my first public speech ever :D https://dmsimard.com/2013/11/26/how-to-contribute-to-puppet-openstack/ Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://dmsimard.com/2013/11/26/how-to-contribute-to-puppet-openstack/ Thanks to the hard work of the puppet-openstack community, Puppet was the preferred method of deployment for Openstack in the latest Openstack User Survey. If you’d like to join in on the fun and contribute, read on ! First things first, a bit of context: Openstack is a modular cloud orchestration platform, self-described as “Open source software for building private and public clouds”. puppet-openstack is a Stackforge project that centralizes the development of puppet modules related to Openstack.