Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 052 - Conclusion of Plan 2.0 era

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin relate the experience of converting a small VMware cluster into two small OpenStack clusters, and the adventures and friends I made along the way.

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 052 - Conclusion of Plan 2.0 era

There isn't much else to say about the Plan 2.0 era.

The next step was to move everything off Cluster 1, cleaning up orchestration and automation each step of the way.  Its the usual IT project fiasco where the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.  Everything was moved off hand-rolled cluster 1 onto Kolla-Ansible cluster 2 by early August.

Some lessons learned:

Networking with OpenStack is like mudwrestling a pig, you're not going to win without a struggle, you're probably going to get exhausted and/or hurt, and in the end the pig seems to like it.  But, it is possible to bend OpenStack Neutron Networking to your will, given enough time, sweat, and sheer stubbornness.  Eventually, 100% features and reliability is possible.

Orchestration is the way of the future and Heat Templates are awesome.

Kolla-Ansible works and requires minimal effort, takes a bit of learning how to override its defaults but eventually it mostly makes sense, most of the time.  I was worried about Kolla-Ansible and my lan ansible getting into configuration fights but with firm demarcation between the configuration systems it was not an issue.  This seems to be the ideal system for deploying an OpenStack cluster.

Logging and monitoring was a time consuming struggle that was worth the time and effort.  There are many paths for monitoring an OpenStack cluster, most of which are dead or deprecated legacy projects, but in the end it IS possible to build a robust and feature filled monitoring system for OpenStack running under or with Kolla-Ansible.

Container infrastructure (Zun/Kuryr) in OpenStack is reliable and effortless and is the way forward with the possible exception of the mystery of backing up container volumes.  Which if you think about it, is kind of traditional for Docker containers LOL.

None of the exciting looking *aaS products in OpenStack are usable, either in general or for my specific purposes, other than Designate, which works perfectly.  Luckily all of them can be replaced by very small Heat templates and Docker containers.

Tomorrow, start to discuss Plan 3.0.

Stay tuned for the next chapter!