Getting Started With OpenStack

OpenStack is one the most popular cloud projects. It's an open source project to build public and/or private clouds. You can use Salt Cloud to launch OpenStack instances.

  • Using the new format, set up the cloud configuration at /etc/salt/cloud.providers or /etc/salt/cloud.providers.d/openstack.conf:
my-openstack-config:
  # Set the location of the salt-master
  #
  minion:
    master: saltmaster.example.com

  # Configure the OpenStack driver
  #
  identity_url: http://identity.youopenstack.com/v2.0/
  compute_name: nova
  protocol: ipv4

  compute_region: RegionOne

  # Configure Openstack authentication credentials
  #
  user: myname
  password: 123456
  # tenant is the project name
  tenant: myproject

  provider: openstack

Using nova client to get information from OpenStack

One of the best ways to get information about OpenStack is using the novaclient python package (available in pypi as python-novaclient). The client configuration is a set of environment variables that you can get from the Dashboard. Log in and then go to Project -> Access & security -> API Access and download the "OpenStack RC file". Then:

source /path/to/your/rcfile
nova credentials
nova endpoints

In the nova endpoints output you can see the information about compute_region and compute_name.

Compute Region

It depends on the OpenStack cluster that you are using. Please, have a look at the previous sections.

Authentication

The user and password is the same user as is used to log into the OpenStack Dashboard.

Profiles

Here is an example of a profile:

openstack_512:
    provider: my-openstack-config
    size: m1.tiny
    image: cirros-0.3.1-x86_64-uec
    ssh_key_file: /tmp/test.pem

size can be one of the options listed in the output of nova flavor-list.

image can be one of the options listed in the output of nova image-list.

Current Salt release: 2014.1.6

Docs for previous releases on salt.rtfd.org.

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