OpenStack Kolla: Dependency Management Done Right With Docker and Ansible

Kolla provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds that are scalable, fast, reliable, and upgradable, using community best practices.  Kolla entered the OpenStack Big Tent during the Liberty cycle by submitting Kolla to OpenStack technical committee oversight --  enabling the Kolla project and its contributors to have access to community resources such as marketing, technical resources, bi-yearly conference space and voting rights in the OpenStack Technical Committee election.

During the creation of the Kolla mission statement, we agreed as a community not to permit the selection of technology choices in our mission statement. Still: we knew we would choose Docker as our container runtime technology, and Ansible as our orchestration system. We made these choices not only because “that’s what all the cool kids are doing’ -- but also because they solve real technical problems for our problem domain.  Docker solves our image management process and Ansible solves our multi-node deployment process.  We could have chosen other technologies to solve these problems, but both Docker and Ansible do something orders of magnitude better than competitors: a complete and absolute focus on simplicity coupled with a high degree of capability.

Since a fundamental factor in outcome of Continue reading