Thursday, July 17, 2014

First experiences with OpenStack

We hit a big milestone this week, as we started to use OpenStack as a private cloud, intially just for QA/integration environments. Up to now we've been creating KVM machines semi-manually, which used to take minutes. Now we cut down that process to seconds, calling the Nova API from the command line, e.g.:

$ nova boot --image precise-image --flavor www --key_name mykey --nic net-id=3eafbd4f-0389-4c5b-93ba-7764742ee8cd www1.qa1

Once an instance is provisioned, we bootstrap it with Chef:

$ knife bootstrap www1.qa1.mydomain.com -x ubuntu --sudo -E qa1 -N www1.qa1 -r "role[base], role[www]"

Our internal network architecture is fairly complex, so my colleague Jeff Roberts spent quite some time bending OpenStack Neutron to his will (in conjunction with Open vSwitch) in order to support our internal VLANs. The OpenStack infrastructure has been stable so far, and it's just such a pleasure to do everything via an API and not to spin VMs up manually. Being back to working with a (private) cloud feels good.

This is just version 1.0 of our OpenStack rollout. Soon we'll start spinning up one environment at a time using chef-metal and fog  and we'll also integrate instance + environment spin-up with Jenkins. Exciting times ahead!

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