ansible-marionette

Orchestrate with Ansible a complex deployment driven by Puppet OpenStack modules.

Overview - What is ansible-marionette?
Quickstart with reference architecture
Advanced deployment with custom architecture
Limitations
Demo

Overview

ansible-marionette are composable Ansible playbooks for deploying OpenStack environments driven by Puppet OpenStack modules. The key word here is composable.

Too often, OpenStack deployment tools are able to deploy OpenStack with a pre-defined set of roles - often called "controller", "compute", "network", "storage". ansible-marionette aims to provide a way to deploy both reference architectures but also complex deployments with custom designs.

Reference architecture

A reference architecture is a set of pre-defined profiles, that already contain some roles. Deploying the reference architecture will help to deploy out-of-the-box OpenStack, in a standard and tested way.

The reference architecture is defined in profile directory.

Each profile has in charge of including the Ansible roles we will deploy.

Roles

A role is defined by an Ansible role, in 'roles' directory. A role is an application and should be isolated from any other application (think containers).

Example of roles: puppet, mysql, keystone.

Each role has in charge of:

Feed hieradata to add the Puppet classes that deploy the application.
Feed hieradata with Hiera parameters to override default values.
Validate that the role is actually working post-deployment, by service validation.

Profiles

A profile has in charge of deploying a set of roles. Example of profiles: controller, compute, storage, network.

Advanced deployments

Now we know what is Reference Architecture, profiles and roles, we need to understand what are advanced deployments.

Advanced deployments are specific architectures, that fit with specific use-cases. They require to break standards and install some services on some nodes and isolate other ones. They don't fit with Reference architecture and that is why this project can be useful: to compose yourself what you want to deploy and validate.

Ansible will be useful here to dynamically generate Hieradata, run Puppet on remote nodes and validate services.

Quickstart

The quickstart is useful for anyone who wants to give a try to this project by just deploying the reference architecture, aka pre-defined roles.

This scenario will deploy OpenStack Liberty and then upgrade to Mitaka.

To get started, you'll need to prepare 2 files and run a script.

Prepare deployment.yaml. An example is provided, please look at it.

---
# pick a host group name, here 'controllers' because it's pretty standard
- hosts: controllers
  roles:
    # Use controller role from Reference Architecture
    - profile/controller
  vars:
    # we'll first deploy liberty
    version: liberty

# order does matter here, before validation
- hosts: all
  roles:
    - puppet-run

# Example with future profiles
#
# - hosts: computes
#   roles:
#     # the profile does not exist yet, but here for example.
#     - profile/compute
#   vars:
#     # we'll first deploy liberty
#     version: liberty
#
#  create host groups as many profiles we support.
# Note: an host group can have multiple profiles.

# order does matter here, before validation
- hosts: all
  roles:
    - puppet-run

# after puppet runs, we want to validate services
- hosts: controllers
  roles:
    - profile/controller/validate

# Example with future profiles
#
# - hosts: computes
#   roles:
#     - profile/compute/validate

# Now upgrading to Mitaka
- hosts: controllers
  roles:
    # Use controller role from Reference Architecture
    - profile/controller
  vars:
    version: mitaka

- hosts: all
  roles:
    - puppet-run

# Example with future profiles
#
# - hosts: computes
#   roles:
#     - profile/compute
#   vars:
#     version: mitaka
- hosts: all
  roles:
    - puppet-run

- hosts: controllers
  roles:
    - profile/controller/validate

# - hosts: computes
#   roles:
#     - profile/compute/validate

Now, prepare inventory file. An example is provided, please look at it.

[controllers]
controller.openstack.org ansible_host=controller.openstack.org ansible_user=centos

# [computes]
# compute1.openstack.org ansible_host=compute1.openstack.org ansible_user=centos
# compute2.openstack.org ansible_host=compute2.openstack.org ansible_user=centos
# compute3.openstack.org ansible_host=compute3.openstack.org ansible_user=centos

You're ready to deploy.

./run_tests.sh

Advanced

This is the right section if you want to learn how to deploy complex environments.

Customize role parameters

Each role can contain parameters. Example in roles/mysql/defaults/main.yaml:

---
mysql_max_connections: 200

This value will be set for mysql::server::override_options in /etc/puppet/hieradata/common.yaml.

Each parameters added in roles/mysql/defaults/main.yaml need to match with an actual Puppet parameter in the class, defined in roles/mysql/install/tasks/main.yaml.

That's a level of customization that allow to add standard parameters, so users just have to change the value of the parameter if needed.

Customize profile with advanced scenario

If the role does not provide the parameter you need (ie: not in roles/mysql/defaults/main.yaml).
If you need to apply some parameters for all roles in a profile (ie: a specific password).
If you want to add custom Puppet classes in a profile, that are not supported by existing roles.

Then you'll like it. Edit roles/profile/controller/defaults/main.yaml (example with controller):

---
# Extra Hiera parameters specific to a profile
hiera_params_extra: |
  keystone::token_expiration: 3000

# Though it's not recommanded, you can add any Puppet class
# in this block.
# The best practice is to create a role for the app you want to deploy,
# and add the role to the profile.
#
hiera_classes_extra:
   classes:
     - mymodule::myclass

That way, you can:

Define custom Puppet parameters at a role level
Define custom Puppet parameters at a profile level
Define custom Puppet classes at a profile level

Note: if you define a Puppet class, you need to make sure the module is installed. This repository is installing modules tested by OpenStack only.

Limitations

Currently, it only works on Red Hat systems (centos7, fedora23 and rhel7).
This is a proof-of-concept, we only support a few services now (mysql, keystone). But more is coming soon.

Demo

Checkout the demo: https://asciinema.org/a/40j0k44gz2iqrpu99qv70fkou