[rdo-list] Packstack refactor and future ideas

[Javier Pena]

Hi RDO,

After some discussions about the way Packstack was (mis)using Puppet, and how to improve it, I've been working on a refactor. Its current state is available at https://github.com/javierpena/packstack/tree/feature/manifest_refactor, and as soon as it is polished it will go to Gerrit. It basically tries to reduce the number of Puppet executions to one per server role (controller, network node, compute), instead of multiple individual runs.

While talking about the refactor, a second discussion about a deeper change was started. I'd like to summarize the current concerns and ideas in this mail, so we can follow-up and make a decision:

- Currently, the Packstack CI is only testing single-node installs. Testing multi-node installs upstream has been challenging, and multi-node may go beyond the PoC target of Packstack. So, one proposal is to keep all-in-one single node only, add Ansible wrapper (in unsupported contrib/ subfolder) reading *_HOSTS parameters for backward compat.

- Another idea was to refactor the Packstack Python part around Ansible, summarized at https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/packstack-refactor-take2 . This proposal aims at keeping multi-node support, since Ansible makes it easy anyway.

Any other ideas/concerns? Pros and cons of each?

Thanks,
Javier