OpenStack Summit Recap - Boston 2017 - OpenStack-Ansible
Boston is a wrap, and the OpenStack-Ansible (OSA) crew were there representing in force.
OpenStack-Ansible Deployments on Show
GE Keynote
The week started off, as usual, with keynotes. In particular, GE gave an impressive keynote about their usage of OpenStack in production. GE uses OpenStack-Ansible to deploy their production environment. Including my (easily) favourite quote of the week in their slide deck:
American Chemical Society (CAS)
CAS gave a "war stories" talk about getting to grips with OpenStack. They had some issues relating to Networking, Compute, and storage which they run through in the talk. What I loved was that this was another story of an OpenStack-Ansible deployment in production. CAS showcased the flexibility that OSA provides, allowing deployers and operators to overcome issues in their deployments in a managed and repeatable way.
It was really great to see large scale deployments of OpenStack-Ansible, in production, with happy operators and deployers.
OpenStack-Ansible Talks
There were several OpenStack-Ansible specific talks on show:
- Project Update - OpenStack-Ansible
- The project update for OSA had a full house. We had a lot of great feedback, including specific commendations for our documentation and security roles, which have been well received. Credit to the team, the hard work is definitely showing.
- Making OpenStack-Ansible work for you!
- This was my talk about helping deployers, developers, and new contributors get involved in OpenStack-Ansible. I had some really great and helpful feedback, which I'll be taking on board - look out for v2 at OpenStack days Germany on the 26th June in Munich.
- Securing OpenStack Clouds and Beyond with Ansible
- Major Hayden gave a talk about the openstack-ansible-security role, which can run against non-OSA hosts, but is maintained and curated by the team.
- Using Ansible to automate the entire IT stack
- Ricardo gives a run down of various projects, including OpenStack-Ansible, as well as various options for managing your whole stack.
- Extending OpenStack-Ansible with Automated Operational Management
- William walks through using OSA, integrating OSA with Nagios, Logstash, and Kibana.
- The COA and why you should take it
- Amy chaired this panel about the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam. Proud to say that the COA exam is setup using OpenStack-Ansible!
- Maximizing Hardware- Server Simulator
- Kevin talks about using a "multi-node-aio" and testing OpenStack using OpenStack-Ansible.
- Grow Your Community- Inspire an Impostor
- I personally can't get enough of Major's dulcet tones. This isn't an OSA related talk really, but I recommend it none-the-less!
OpenStack-Ansible Project Onboarding
This was the first summit where project-specific onboarding had been available, and it was a great opportunity to meet some interested contributors and help to get them involved! We were fortunate to have one of these slots, and I'm glad we did - we had another full house, and we were able to cover a lot of topics and information all driven by what the people in the room wanted to learn about.
You can view the etherpad we used to get new contributors more familiar with etherpad and to document and paste links to various topics as we discussed them.
Directly after the session, Chris made his first commit. Which is a great way to showcase the usefulness of the onboarding session. Congratulations Chris!
OpenStack-Ansible Operators Feedback
Operators feedback is really important to us as a deployment project. We had another great turnout, and a lot of really useful feedback.
Some of the key themes:
- Offline installs, or installs via proxy hosts are hard.
- Improvements to the documentation and process to achieve these scenarios was requested.
- Trusty -> Xenial upgrades concerns.
- We had already started an etherpad which covers this and can be added to. However, we will be looking into converting this into more official documentation.
- Leapfrog upgrades.
- Role integration for upstream roles.
- Better documentation is required here.
- Being able to utilize patch-sets from upstream patches.
More details can be found on the session etherpad.
I18n check-site
Working with the Horizon and I18n teams, a translations check-site is being setup utilizing OpenStack-Ansible to allow translators to run through translations throughout the cycle. This is a great showcase of the strength of the OpenStack community. A great deal of progress was made, and we're looking to have something up and running soon!
Summary
Another successful summit for OSA, with a lot of buzz and interest in the project. New contributors coming onboard and a lot of great hallway-track discussions. There are a few pointers and places that we can focus on, but overall a great deal of positive feedback - especially around our documentation, the hard work is paying off!