{"id":9321,"date":"2015-11-25T11:50:42","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T09:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/?p=9321"},"modified":"2015-12-01T10:58:31","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T08:58:31","slug":"openstack-heat-plugin-for-apache-cloudstack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/openstack-heat-plugin-for-apache-cloudstack\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenStack Heat plugin for Apache CloudStack"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog post presents a plugin for <\/span>OpenStack Hea<\/span><\/a>t<\/span> which adds support for <\/span>Apache CloudStack<\/span><\/a> resources and thus enables a template-based orchestration on CloudStack using Heat. <\/span>As this plugin extends the standard Heat\u2019s resource type list it can also be used within our <\/span>Hurtle orchestrator<\/span><\/a> for providing your application as a service or any other application underlying on Heat. <\/span>This work follows from our earlier work in which we developed a <\/span>Heat plugin for SDC<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

An orchestration is a crucial part of a cloud application and service delivery. OpenStack Heat lets users to specify templates describing application resources such as virtual machines, networks, security groups, … including their dependencies. Based on these templates Heat then does the job of resolving these dependencies and decides the order in which the resources are being created and creates them. A heat plugin extends the set of the available resources and these are then handle in the same way as the original ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Heat has become popular OpenStack component and usually is the first-choice orchestrator for the most of OpenStack users and administrators, CloudStack lacks a dedicated orchestration solution and generally depends on third-party solutions such as <\/span>Cloudify<\/span><\/a>. With Hurtle in mind we developed a plugin that extends the set of available Heat resources with CloudStack ones thus opening the CloudStack universe to Heat users.\u00a0<\/span>Moreover, now you can \u201c<\/span>hurtle.it<\/span><\/a>\u201d in CloudStack environments as easy as in OpenStack.<\/span><\/p>\n

Developing a heat plugin requires a resource specification including a specification of the resource attributes, specification of how to handle the standard resource operations such as resource creation, deletion and providing a mechanism that checks whether the operation succeeds. More information on how to write an Heat plugin can be found in <\/span>our presentation here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

So far our plugin integrates following CloudStack resources:<\/span><\/p>\n