Preface

The Plan

This page was intended to complete the OpenStack SDK with templated userdata portion of this Infrastructure Via Code set. This involves:

  • Adding runcmd and bootcmd sections to userdata-default.yaml.jinja
  • Adding the full set of required files for the desired instances
  • Combining the full userdata with create-instances.py script

We were going leave a few things to later pages; for example:

  • Adding public DNS updates (required to meet some dependencies) (OVH API, not OpenStack)
  • Adding other ‘simple orchestration’ details
  • Bringing ‘real’ instances up with this system

None of these would have required changes to the OpenStack code.

Halted and Why

While our internal tests (using private data that would need to be replaced with dummy data) of a full config were successful, frustrations with ‘our’ OpenStack hosting provider (and researching other Canadian OpenStack providers suggests that there aren’t others doing a better job, and that my current provider is the one with the greatest chance of ‘business continuity’) has led to the conclusion that it’s not a viable cloud alternative for us.

Therefore we are not continuing with this project.

In addition it is our finding that this approach involves more effort than if Terraform were a viable option, so if we were to continue with public cloud infrastructure we would prefer services with which we can successfully use Terraform.

Code

The scripts, configs, etc described on this page are available in a Git repo @ https://github.com/wildtechgarden/ivc-in-the-wtg-experiments.