OpenStack Summit November 2013

OpenStack Heat is gaining momentum as a DevOps tool to orchestrate the creation of OpenStack cloud environments. Heat is based on a DSL describing simple orchestration of cloud objects, but lacks better representation of the middleware and the application components as well as more complex deployment and post-deployment orchestration workflows. The Heat community has started discussing a higher level DSL that will support not just infrastructure components.


This session will present a further extended suggestion for a DSL based on the TOSCA specification, which covers broader aspects of an application behavior and deployment such as the installation, configuration management, continuous deployment, auto-healing and scaling. We will also share some of our thoughts on how this DSL can interface with native OpenStack projects, such as Heat, Keystone and Ceilometer.

As the core network abstractions provided by Neutron is getting widespread usage, newer abstractions for network services (such as service insertion and service chaining) are being worked out by the Neutron community. However, it remains unclear if the provided level of abstraction is suitable at higher layers of the stack. In particular, applications that are used for deploying various workloads may find a different and higher level network abstraction more useful. In this talk we first present the Neutron abstraction for networking resources including the newly developed network services. We then show how different levels of network abstraction can be more useful at higher layers and propose alternative workload-centric abstractions for network resources. In particular, we discuss Heat and TOSCA as they relate to specifying the network requirements of various real-world workloads.