As the Juno (2014.2) development cycle ramps up, now is a good time to review the changes we saw in Heat during the preceding Icehouse (2014.1) cycle and have a look at what is coming up next in the pipeline. This update is also available as a webinar that I recorded for the OpenStack Foundation, as are the other PTL updates. The RDO project is collecting a list of written updates like this one.
While absolute statistics are not always particularly relevant, a comparison between the Havana and Icehouse release cycles shows that the Heat project continues to grow rapidly. In fact, Heat was second only to Nova in numbers of commits for the Icehouse release. As well as building contributor depth we are also rotating the PTL position to build leadership depth, so the project is in very healthy shape.
Changes in Icehouse
The biggest change in Icehouse is the addition of software configuration and deployment resource types. These enable template authors to define software configurations separately from the servers on which they are to be deployed. This makes, amongst other things, for much easier re-usability of artifacts. Software deployments can integrate with your existing configuration management tools - in some cases the shims to do so are already available, and we expect to add more during the Juno cycle.
The Heat Orchestration Template format (Hot) is now frozen at version 2013-05-12. Any breaking changes we make to it in future will be accompanied by a bump in the version number, so you can start using the Hot format with confidence that templates should continue to work in the future.
In order to enable that, template formats and the intrinsic functions that they provide are now pluggable. In Icehouse this is effectively limited to different versions of the existing template types, but in future operators will be able to easily deploy arbitrary template format plugins.
Heat now offers custom parameter constraints - for example, you can specify that a parameter must name a valid Glance image - that provide earlier and better error messages to template users. These are also pluggable, so operators can deploy their own, and more will be added in the future.
There are now OpenStack-native resource types for autoscaling, meaning that you can now scale resource types other than AWS::EC2::Instance. In fact, you can scale not just OS::Nova::Server resources, but any type of resource (including provider resources). Eventually there will be a separate API for scaling groups along the lines of these new resource types.
The heat-engine process is now horizontally scalable (though not yet stateless). Each stack is processed by a single engine at a time, but incoming requests can be spread across multiple engines. (The heat-api processes, of course, are stateless and have always been horizontally scalable.)
The API is growing additions to help operators manage a Heat deployment - for example to allow a cloud administrator to get a list of all stacks created by all users in Heat. These improvements will continue into Juno, and will eventually result in a v2 API to tidy up some legacy cruft.
Finally, Heat no longer requires a user to be an administrator in order to create some types of resources. Previously resources like wait conditions required the admin role, because they involved creation of a user with limited access that could authenticate to post data back to Heat. Creating a user requires admin rights, but in Icehouse Heat creates the user itself in a separate domain to avoid this problem.
Juno Roadmap
Software configurations made their debut in Icehouse, and will get more powerful still in Juno. Template authors will be able to specify scripts to handle all of the stages of an application’s life-cycle, including delete, suspend/resume, and update.
Up until now if the creation of a stack or the rollback of an update failed, or if an update failed with rollback disabled, there was nothing further you could do with the stack apart from delete it. In Juno this will finally change - you will be able to recover from a failure by doing another stack update.
There also needs to be a way to cancel a stack update that is still in progress, and we plan to introduce a new API for that.
We are working toward making autoscaling more robust for applications that are not quite stateless (examples include TripleO and Platforms as a Service like OpenShift). The plan is to allow notifications prior to modifying resources to give the application the chance to quiesce the server (this will probably be extended to all resources managed by Heat), and also to allow the application to have a say in which nodes get removed on scaling down.
At the moment, Heat relies very heavily on polling to detect changes in the state of resources (for example, while a Nova server is being built). In Juno, Heat will start listening for notifications to reduce the overhead involved in polling. (Polling is unlikely to go away altogether, but it can be reduced markedly.) In the long term, beyond the Juno horizon, this is leading to continuous monitoring of a stack’s status, but for now we are laying down the foundations.
There will also be other performance improvements, particularly with respect to database access. TripleO relies on Heat and has some audacious goals for deployment sizes, so that is driving performance improvements for all users. We can now profile Heat using the Rally project, so that should help us to identify more bottlenecks.
In Juno, Heat will gain an OpenStack-native Heat stack resource type, and it will be capable of deploying nested stacks in remote regions. That will allow users to deploy multi-region applications using a single tree of nested stacks.
Adopting and abandoning stack resources makes it possible to transition existing applications to and from Heat’s control. These features are actually available already in Icehouse, but they are still fairly rough around the edges; we hope they will be cleaned up for Juno. This is always going to be a fairly risky operation to perform manually, but it provides a viable option for automatic migrations (Trove is one potential user).
Operations Considerations
There are a few changes in the pipeline that OpenStack operators should take note of when planning their future upgrades.
Perhaps the most pressing is version 3 of the Keystone API. Heat increasingly relies on features available only in the v3 API. While there is a v2 shim to allow basic functionality to work without it for now, operators should look to start testing and deploying the v3 API alongside v2 as soon as possible.
Heat has now adopted the released Oslo messaging library for RPC messages (previously it used the Oslo incubator code). This may require some configuration changes, so operators should be aware of it when upgrading to Juno.
Finally, we expect the Heat engine to begin splitting into multiple servers. The first one is likely to be an “observer” process tasked with listening for notifications, but expect more to follow as we distribute the workload more evenly across systems. We expect everything split out from the Heat engine to be horizontally scalable from the beginning.
