Mirantis OpenStack 6.0: now with plugins

Authors: Nikolay Markov, Ilya Stechkin, Irina Povolotskaya

The global OpenStack Summit is approaching immensely. This transcendental tusovka takes place twice a year in different cities of the world (this time, for example, Vancouver was honored to receive the event) and gives an opportunity to anyone who is interested in the development of the OpenStack ecosystem to exchange news and at the same time determine which direction develop a platform. And besides, the summit disciplines the developers, forcing them to quickly finish the new versions of distributions in order to present them to the most respectable assembly. Mirantis is no exception.

We are preparing improvements to our current - the sixth - release of Mirantis OpenStack (or MOS, as they call it for simplicity ). Still, the main changes have already occurred. And we are lagging behind life - we just had time to talk about the changes that occurred in the previous release and related to the containerization of applications using Docker.
')
Meanwhile, nothing stands still. In MOS 6.0, containerization is definitely used. But the main innovation was the transition to architecture, providing the opportunity to work with plug-ins (pluggable architecture). This is important if only because you now have the opportunity to embed your own plug-ins in Fuel - a tool for deploying MOS-cloud and further managing it. But we have already talked about the fuel in more detail in the previous post . And in this we are more interested in plugins.

Why plugins?

It is impossible to predict all the unique needs of users: someone needs NFS , and someone cannot live without LbaaS (Load-Balancing-as-a-Service) ... Instead of creating a unique distribution for the tasks of a specific client each time (and this increases cloud deployment time and project cost), we made a MOS constructor. And now, to customize the distribution, it is enough to create the appropriate plugin. We began to collect a collection of certified plug-ins: a bank of standard solutions will allow our customers to save even more money and time (and this despite the fact that Mirantis solutions now already compare favorably with prices from other cloud solution providers playing in the Russian market).

What is plugin certification?

Certification procedure is not mandatory for plugin developers. However, if you nevertheless decided, then you need to understand that when certifying a plugin, a number of requirements are presented and it is more thoroughly tested. For us, a “certified plugin” is, first of all, proven, reliable, safe to use, that is, one that does not break anything in the environment. When we promise thorough verification, this means that the plug-in will be tested directly by the PI (Partner Integration) team according to a test report: a series of cases from the report are taken and repeated by our specialists. This means that before certification, the plugin should already be tested according to the established procedure and the results of this test should be presented to our company's PI. Thus, our test is repeated. The result obtained is compared with what is described in the report. Once again we draw attention to the fact that the certification procedure is strictly voluntary. Having a certificate in a plugin means only that Mirantis guarantees its stable operation and support.

Plugins from a user's perspective

1) Go to the plugins directory on the Mirantis website ;
2) select the plugin and download it;
3) copy the selected plugin to the master node using secure copy:

scp fuel_plugin_name-1.0.0.fp root @: master_node_ip: / tmp
cd / tmp
fuel plugins --install fuel_plugin_name-1.0.0.fp

4) After you create a new environment, in the Fuel user interface, in the “Settings” tab, tick the checkbox (if necessary, fill in additional fields for the plugin);
5) Configure the environment;
6) unlock the cloud;
7) Enjoy using the plugin.

Please note: to work with a plugin, you need to install it BEFORE how to deploy and configure the environment. Otherwise, you will have to repeat the environment deployment procedure in order to be able to connect the installed plug-in.

Plugins from a developer’s point of view

Write the code of the plugin that executes its business logic, and write the description of the plugin as described in the instructions (Engl) .
When ready - take fpb and build your plugin so that it can be delivered (in the process of development it's just code and packages).
In order to make it easier for developers to create new plug-ins, we have developed a tool called Fuel Plugin Builder , which is essentially a simple command line utility that allows you to quickly and effortlessly create a “skeleton” for your future plug-in . As you already understood, we are not patrons of art - it is beneficial for us that as many new developers as possible fill up a bank of certified plugins. Just because we care about the developers! ;)

What else is new in MOS 6.0, except plugins

But not a single plug-in is rich in MOS 6.0. We traditionally podgadvayem updates distribution to the release of a new version of the platform, so it is not surprising that MOS 6.0 supports the release of Juno. Well, and besides, now users accustomed to VMware have the opportunity to choose vCenter as their hypervisor for their OpenStack cluster, and NSX as their network solution (thanks to our Partner Integration team). Also, when using vCenter, vSphere data storage support is available as a backend for Glance. You can specify your preferences using check boxes in the UI.

Naturally, we remember that in the world of cloud technologies the stability and scalability of the platform are of paramount importance. Testing MOS 6.0 in our laboratory on real equipment, we were able to assert that Fuel will be able to deploy a cloud surrounded by 100 nodes. But that's not all: read about additional changes in the material on the results of the May summit. And we will talk further about the Murano application directory.