Cloudify

I have been doing some work with Cloudify.

First, someone gave me access to an instance. Without spending up-front time reading up on Cloudify, I always try to see if I can intuitively figure it out without reading anything.

Not the case with Cloudify.

I had to take some steps to "get into" Cloudify, and I will recap some of those.

1. I went to YouTube, and watched a couple of Videos.

This was somewhat valuable, but I felt this was "hands-on" technology. I knew I would need to install this in my home lab to get proficient with it; that was clear from watching the videos.

2. I logged onto a Cloudify Instance, and looked through the UI

I saw the Blueprints, but couldn't read any of the meta information. Finally I figured out that if I switched browsers, I could scroll down and see the descriptors.

3. Reading up on TOSCA - and Cloudify TOSCA specifically

In examining the descriptors, I realized they were Greek to me, and had to take a step back and read and learn. So I first started reading up on some of the TOSCA standards, and standards like these are tedious and frankly, quite boring after a while.  But - as a result of doing this, I started to realize that Cloudify has extended the TOSCA descriptors.  So, there is a degree of proprietary with regards to Cloudify, and in reading a few blogs, Cloudify "sorta kinda" follows the ETSI MANO standards, but in extending (and probably changing) some of the TOSCA YAML descriptors, they are going to create some vendor lock-in. They tout this as "value add", and "innovation" of course. Hey - that is how people try to make money with standards.

4. Finally, I decided to stick my toe in the water

I logged onto Cloudify Manager, and decided I would try the openstack-example-network.

It wouldn't upload, so I had to look into why. We had the v3.x version of the OpenStack Plugin, which requires a compat.xml file that was not loaded. In figuring this out, I realized we probably shouldn't even be using that version of the plugin since the plugin is supported on version 5.x of Cloudify Manager, and we were running version 4.6.

So, I uninstalled version 3.x of the OpenStack plugin. And tried to upload the sample example blueprint, and voila', success. I stopped there, because I wanted to see if I could create my own blueprint.

5. Created my own Blueprint

Our initial interest in a use case was not to deploy services per se, but to onboard new customers onto an OpenStack platform. So, I saw the palette in OpenStack Composer for the OpenStack Plugin v2.14.7, and it allowed you to create all kinds of OpenStack objects. I decided to put a User and a Project on the palette. I used some web documentation to learn about secrets (which were already created by a Cloudify Consultant who set up the system), and used those to configure the openstack_config items on the project and user. I then configured up the user and project sections.

1. I saved the blueprint, 
2. validated the blueprint (no complaints from Composer on that), 
3. and then uploaded the blueprint to Cloudify Manager.

6. I then attempted to Deploy the Blueprint

This seemed to work, but I did not see a new project or user on the system. I saw a bunch of console messages on the Cloudify Manager GUI, but didn't really see any errors.

It is worth noting that I don't see any examples on the web of people trying to "onboard" an OpenStack tenant. Just about all examples are people instantiating some kind of VM on an already-configured OpenStack platform (tenants, users, projects, et al already created).

7. Joined the Cloudify Slack Community

At this point, I signed up for the Cloudify Slack Community, and am trying to seek some assistance from this point on figuring out why my little blueprint did not seem to execute on the target system.

...Meanwhile, I spun up a new thread, and did some additional things:

8. Installed the Cloudify qcow2 image

If you try to do this, it directs you to the Cloudify Sales page. But there is a link to get the back versions, and I downloaded version 4.4 of the qcow2 image. 

NOTE: I did not launch this in OpenStack. It surprised me that this was what they seemed to want you to do, because most Orchestrators I have seen operate from outside the OpenStack domain (as a VM outside of OpenStack).

This qcow2 is a CentOS7 image, and I could not find a password to get into the operating system image itself  (i.e. as root). What they instead ask you to do, is just hit the ip address from a browser using http (not https!), and see if you get a GUI for Cloudify Manager (I did). Then use your default login. I did log in successfully, and that is as far as I have gotten for now.

9. Installed the CLI

The CLI is an rpm, and I installed this rpm and it installed successfully. So I plan to configure that and use that CLI to learn the CLI and interact with Cloudify Manager.

So, let's see what I learn to get to the next steps. More on this later.