[Rdo-list] RDO-Manager "quickstart"

[Rich Bowen]

One of the goals of the RDO Packstack Quickstart is to give people a 
successful and easy first-time experience deploying OpenStack, even if 
what they're left with (an --allinone deployment) might not be, strictly 
speaking, *useful* for much.

Today on IRC I asked if we might possibly work towards a similar 
quickstart for RDO-Manager, where we make a bunch of assumptions and 
automate whatever parts of it we can, and end up with a "do these three 
steps" kind of thing, like the Packstack quickstart.

I've included the transcript of the conversation below, but since IRC 
transcripts can be confusing after the fact, to summarize, slagle opined 
that it might be feasible to have two paths - the full-featured path 
that we currently have, but also something as I described above for your 
first time.

I wanted to toss this out here for a larger audience to see whether this 
seems like a reasonable goal to pursue?






<rbowen>	Is it feasible that we might get the RDO-Manager instructions 
down to a Quickstart-like page?
<rbowen>	I don't even necessarily mean NOW, I mean, as a short/medium 
term goal. The instructions are very intimidating.
<morazi>	rbowen, I suspect we might be able to do that if we make a fair 
number of assumptions and possibly try to leverage some amount of the 
upstream CI work slagle is presently hacking on.  slagle may violently 
disagree in which case, ignore what I just said.  ;-)
<slagle>	morazi: rbowen : sure, we can trim whatever. just keep in mind 
i might not be the best docs writer. we originally started small, but 
that just caused a lot of mistakes/issues. so we made a conscious 
decision to be explicit
<slagle>	hence the current nature of the docs
<rbowen>	Yeah, I think there's room for both types of docs, much like 
there's room for the Packstack quickstart and the full-blown 
do-it-by-hand OpenStack installation docs.
<morazi>	slagle, oh, I was thinking about -- can we lift the ci script 
and say -- your quickstart is to configure this script.  The full blown 
install is <link to docs>
<slagle>	well, we're documenting the same tool
<slagle>	and...are stated goal is not to be packstack
<slagle>	i'm all for making it easy
<slagle>	but we're still bound by how complex openstack is to install in 
*real* world configurations
<morazi>	rbowen, basically with a highly specific/opinionated virtual 
environment I think we could make it really easy.  If you want to inject 
choice back into it, things get complex quickly.  That's the crux to me 
if that makes sense.
<rbowen>	I think perhaps what I'm looking for isn't entirely realistic, 
but it's kind of the "success first time" goal that was part of the 
original Quickstart page.
<morazi>	rbowen, what might be interesting is -- what are the 
assumptions that the packstack quickstart makes for you?  Can we easily 
figure that out?
<rbowen>	And then once you have a successful first time, you can learn 
more about various steps.
<rbowen>	The quickstart does kind of  assume that you'll be left with 
something that's ... well, not very useful.
<rbowen>	But it gives you a flavor of it.
<slagle>	rbowen: yea, agreed. it's about finding the right balance there
<rbowen>	Much like the "how fast can you install OpenStack from scratch" 
contests they had at OpenStack Summit.
<ibravo>	for what it's worth, I followed the guides and they are already 
simple. There is an appendix for more complex stuff
<slagle>	the feedback swings from "this is too hard", then the more we 
hide away behind scripts we start hearing "i don't know what this is 
doing, too much is hidden"
<morazi>	ibravo, cool, thx for that feedback!
<slagle>	rbowen: so, 2 paths probably makes sense
<apevec>	dmsimard, how come is enforcing, when it has -permissive- in 
the name??
<morazi>	ibravo, I tend to agree.  They are pretty simple but there is a 
lot there in terms of number of steps.  nothing in particular is super 
hard but you have to do many things.
<rbowen>	ibravo: Ok, that's good to hear. I obviously need to block off 
a half day at some point to work through it. I mostly skimmed through 
and it was intimidating, but I was in a hurry.



-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
OpenStack Community Liaison
http://rdoproject.org/