Infuse more flexibility into OpenStack Heat templates
OpenStack admins use Heat templates to streamline cloud resource deployment. What are the templates' main components, and how can we use them in more flexible ways?
OpenStack Heat is the orchestration component within the open source cloud platform. Admins can use Heat to deploy a full cloud stack, consisting of any number of VMs and associated configurations. To deploy stacks using OpenStack Heat, admins need to create a template in Heat Object Template format.
An OpenStack Heat template is written in YAML Ain't Markup Language, and everything in it is passed in YAML format. This includes the template file itself, as well as the additional properties that need to be processed in the Heat Object Template (HOT). Admins can write template files in a static way that contains all the required parameters, but that's not always flexible enough for stack deployments in an ever-changing environment such as OpenStack.
OpenStack Heat example with environment files
To work with parameters in a more flexible way, admins can use OpenStack Heat environment files. Then, the HOT is processed by the heat command together with the environment file. In the template itself, admins set variables to refer to specific parameters and can define these parameters in the HOT itself -- which is the case in the example in Listing 1 below -- or in an environment file.
In this example, you can see the variable is referred to by using the curly braces: { get_resource: volume }.
This refers to the volume parameter, which admins define later in the template file. The term resources refers to the specific OpenStack components -- such as compute instances and security groups -- admins want to deploy.
Listing 1: Sample HOT contents
heat_template_version: 2014-10-16
description: A simple server
resources:
server:
type: OS::Nova::Server
properties:
block_device_mapping:
- device_name: vda
delete_on_termination: true
volume_id: { get_resource: volume }
flavor: m1.nano
networks:
- network: internal001
user_data_format: RAW
user_data: |
#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 ]; do echo $((13**99)) 1>/dev/null 2>&1; done
volume:
type: OS::Cinder::Volume
properties:
image: 'Cirros 0.3.4'
size: 1
When admins define and use additional parameters in environment files, they have more flexibility with OpenStack Heat, especially as it increases scalability. To deploy a private cloud stack with both the HOT and the environment file, run the heat command, as in heat stack-create -r -f my-template.yaml -e my-env.yaml my-stack. Here, the -f option refers to the HOT, and the -e option refers to the environment file.
Environment files are not the only option for increased flexibility; admins could also include specific parameters when they run the heat command with the -P key=value argument.
