When it comes to private cloud deployments of Cloud Foundry, OpenStack is often the infrastructure of choice. The OpenStack ecosystem is vibrant and growing, and for an installation, there is a huge number of projects to choose from. Each project comes with its own set of configurations. That’s why OpenStack validation for Cloud Foundry is something that has to be done on each installation. A certification of distributions would not be enough. Many people who wish to install Cloud Foundry on their OpenStack installation ask the same question: “Will it run on *my* OpenStack?”
Manual OpenStack Validation
The official Cloud Foundry documentation provides you a list of manual steps to validate your OpenStack instance, but states at the same time, that “The requirements listed here are considered necessary but not sufficient for BOSH to be able to use your OpenStack deployment. If you cannot perform any one of these tasks successfully, BOSH will not work; however, satisfying all these requirements does not ensure that BOSH will work.”
Currently, most people set up their own test suites which use BOSH to deploy a test release to their OpenStack and tinker until they finally get it to work. This can be a tedious task, because although we all love BOSH for its power, it is full of idiosyncrasies that you have to internalize before being able to track down *why* something doesn’t work.
Automating OpenStack Validation
That’s why we, the BOSH OpenStack CPI team, came up with a validation suite to check in an automated way if you’re able to install Cloud Foundry to a given OpenStack installation using BOSH. The suite, called cf-openstack-validator, covers all manual steps from the official Cloud Foundry documentation above. The cf-openstack-validator uses the BOSH OpenStack CPI to spin up VMs and create other resources in the same way that BOSH will use it when installing Cloud Foundry. Additionally, there are some tests talking directly to the OpenStack API using fog-openstack. If a problem is found, you get some actionable feedback, telling you what needs to be changed for either your deployment configuration or OpenStack installation.
NTP servers are needed for many security features
Instead of performing a bunch of manual tests, which won’t provide complete confidence in a deployment’s functionality, you can run an automated test suite that gives you some actionable feedback in case something isn’t right!
On September 2, we released version 1.1.0 of the validator, which makes it easier to focus individual tests. In the future, we will provide an extension mechanism, such that vendors building a product based on open-source Cloud Foundry can add their own tests and provide their test suite to possible customers or partners.
If you’re interested in more technical details about the cf-openstack-validator, you can watch the presentation at this year’s Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara given by Cornelius Schumacher (from SUSE Linux) and Beyhan Veli (from SAP).
Request for Comments
If you’re running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack, please give the validator a try and let us know what you think! Drop by the SAP booth at Cloud Foundry Summit Frankfurt and talk to us about validating OpenStack and your experiences! We’d love to hear your battle stories and feedback about the cf-openstack-validator!
