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After only 3 take off/landings I was very happy to participate in the Stein PTG in Denver. This is a brief summary with pointers of the sessions or rooms I attended in the order they happened (Stein PTG Schedule)
Upgrades CI with the stand-alone deployment
We had a productive impromptu round table (weshay++) in one of the empty rooms with the tripleo ci folks present (weshay, panda, sshnaidm, arxcruz, marios) the tripleo upgrades folks present (chem and holser) as well emeritus PTL mwahaha around the stand-alone and how we can use it for upgrades ci. We introduced the proposed spec and one of the main topics discussed was, ultimately is it worth it, to solve all of these subproblems to only end up with some approximation of the upgrade?
The consensus was yes since we can have 2 types of upgrades job: use the stand-alone to ci the actual tasks, i.e. upgrade_tasks and deployment_tasks for each service in the tripleo-heat-templates, and another job (the current job which will be adapted) to ci the upgrades workflow tripleoclient/mistral workflows etc. There was general consensus in this approach between the upgrades and ci representatives so that we could try and sell it to the wider team in the tripleo room on wednesday together.
Upgrades Special Interest Group
Monday afternoon was spent in the upgrades SIG room. There was first discussion of the placement api extraction and how this would have to be dealt with during the upgrade, with a solution sketched out around the db migrations required.
This lead into discussion around pre-upgrade checks that could deal with things like db migrations (or just check if something is missing and fail accordingly before the upgrade). As I was reminded during the lunchtime presentations pre upgrade checks is one of the Stein community goals (together with python-3). The idea is that each service would own a set of checks that should be performed before an upgrade is run and that they would be invoked via the openstack client (sthing along the lines of ‘openstack pre-upgrade-check nova’ - I believe there is already some implementation (from the nova team) but I don’t readily have details.
There was then a productive discussion about the purpose and direction of the upgrades SIG. One of the points raised was that the SIG should not be just about the fast forward upgrade even though that has been a main focus until now. The pre-upgrade checks are a good example of that and the SIG will try and continue to promote these with adoption by all the OpenStack services. On that note I proposed that whilst the services themselves will own the service specific pre-upgrade checks, it’s the deployment projects which will own the pre-upgrade infrastructure checks, such as healthy cluster/database or responding service endpoints.
There was ofcourse discussion around the fast forward upgrade with status updates from the deployment projects present (kolla-ansible, TripleO, charms, OSA). TripleO is the only project with an implemented workflow at present. Finally there was a discussion about whether we’re doing better in terms of operator experience for upgrades in general and how we can continue to improve (e.g. rolling upgrades was one of the discussed points here).
Edge room
Room etherpad Room etherpad2 Use cases Edge primer
I was only in attendance for the first part of this session which was about understanding the requirements (and hopefully continuing to find the common ground). The room started with a review of the various proposed use cases from dublin and any review of work since then. One of the main points raised by shardy is that in TripleO whilst we have a number of exploratory efforts ongoing (like split controlplane for example) it would be good to have a specific architecture to aim for and that is missing currently. It was agreed that the existing use cases will be extended to include the proposed architecture and that these can serve as a starting point for anyone looking to deploy with edge locations.
There are pointers to the rest of the edge sessions in the etherpad above.
TripleO room
The order of sessions was slightly revised from that listed in the etherpad above because the East coast storms forced folks to change travel plans. The following order is to the best of my recollection ;)
TripleO and Edge cloud deployments
There was first a summary from the Edge room from shardy and then tripleo specific discussion around the current work (split controlplane). There was some discussion around possibly using/repurposing “the multinode job” for multiple stacks to simulate the Edge locations in ci. There was also discussion around the networking aspects (though this will depend on the architecture which we don’t yet have fully targetted) with respect to the tripleo deployment networks (controlplane/internalapi etc) in an edge deployment. Finally there was consideration of the work needed in tripleo-common and the mistral workflows needed for the split controlplane deployment.
OS / Platform
(tracked on main tripleo etherpad linked above)
The main items discussed here were Python 3 support, removing instack-undercloud and “that upgrade” to Centos8 on Stein.
For Python3 the discussion included the fact that in TripleO we are bound by whatever python the deployed services support (as well as what the upstream distribution will be i.e. Centos 7/8 and which python ships where).
For the Centos8/Stein upgrade the upgrades folks chem and holser lead the discussion outlining how we will need a completely new workflow, which may be dictated in large by how the Centos8 is delivered. One of the approaches discussed here was to use a completely external/distinct upgrade workflow for the OS, versus the TripleO driven OpenStack upgrade itself. We got into more details about this during the Baremetal session see below).
TripleO CI
One of the first items raised was the stand-alone deployment and its use in ci. The general proposal is that we should use a lot more of it! In particular to replace existing jobs (like scenarios 1/2) with a standalone deployement.
There was also discussion around the stand-alone for the upgrades ci as we agreed with the upgrades folks on Monday (spec). The idea of service vs workflow upgrades was presented/solidified here and I have just updated v8 of the spec accordingly to emphasise this point.
Other points discussed in the CI session were testing ovb in infra and how we could make jobs voting. The first move will be towards removing te-broker.
There was also some consideration of the involvement of the ci team with other squads and vice versa. There is a new column in our trello board called “requests from other DFG”.
A further point raised was the reproducer scripts and future directions including running and not only generating this in ci. As related side note it sounds like folks are using the reproducer and having some successes.
Ansible / Framework
(tracked on main tripleo etherpad linked above)
In this session an overview of the work towards splitting out the ansible tasks from the tripleo-heat-templates into re-usable roles was given by jillr and slagle. More info and pointers in the the main tripleo etherpad above.
Security
Discussion around the workflow to change overcloud/service passwords (this is currently borked!). In particular problems around trying to CI this since the deploy takes too long to have deploy + stack update for the passwords and validation within the timeout. Possibly could be a 3rd party (but then non voting) job for now. There was also an overview of work towards using Castellan with TripleO, as well as discussion around selinux and locking down ssh.
UX / UI
CLI/UI feature parity is a main goal for this cycle (and further probably it seems there is a lot to do) and plan management operations around this. Also good discussion around validations with Tengu joining remotely via Bluejeans to champion the effort of providing a nice way to run these via the tripleoclient.
Baremetal
This session started with discussion around metalsmith vs nova on the undercloud and the required upgrade path to make this so. Also considered were the overcloud image customization and discussions around network automation (ansible with python-networking-ansible ml2 driver ).
However unexpectedly and the most interesting part of this session personally was an impromptu design session started by ipilcher (prompted by a question from phuongh who I believe was new to the room). The session was about the upgrade to Centos8 and three main approaches were explored, the “big bang” (everything off upgrade everything back), “some kind of rolling upgrade” and finally supporting either Centos8/Rocky or Centos7/Stein. The first and third were deemed unworkable but there was a very lively and well engaged group design session trying to navigate to a workable process for the ‘rolling upgrade’ aka split personality. Thanks to ipilcher (via bandini) the whiteboards looked like this.
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