In this article I would like to introduce tripleo-quickstart, a tool that will automatically provision a virtual environment and then use TripleO to deploy an HA OpenStack on top of it. Introducing Tripleo-Quickstart The goal of the Tripleo-Quickstart project is to replace the instack-virt-setup tool for quickly setting up virtual TripleO environments, and to ultimately become the tool used by both developers and upstream CI for this purpose. The project is a set of Ansible playbooks that will take care of:

I wrote earlier about systemd-nspawn, and how it can take much of the fiddly work out of setting up functional chroot environments. I’m a regular Ansible user, and I wanted to be able to apply some of those techniques to my playbooks. Ansible already has a chroot module, of course, but for some situations – such as targeting an emulated chroot environment – that just means a lot of extra work.

If you have an Ansible inventory file that includes lots of per host variables, it’s not unusual for lines to get long enough that they become unwieldly, particularly if you want to discuss them in an email or write about them in some context (e.g., a blog post). I’ve just submitted pull request #14359 to Ansible which implements support for folding long lines using the INI-format convention of using indent to mark extended logical lines.

This is the second in a loose sequence of articles looking at new features in Ansible 2.0. In the previous article I looked at the Docker connection driver. In this article, I would like to provide an overview of the new-and-much-improved suite of modules for interacting with an OpenStack environment, and provide a few examples of their use. In versions of Ansible prior to 2.0, there was a small collection of OpenStack modules.

When writing Ansible roles I occasionally want a way to just run a role from the command line, without having to muck about with a playbook. I’ve seen similar requests on the mailing lists and on irc. I’ve thrown together a quick wrapper that will allow you (and me!) to do exactly that, called ansible-role. The –help output looks like this: usage: ansible-role [-h] [–verbose] [–gather] [–no-gather] [–extra-vars EXTRA_VARS] [-i INVENTORY] [–hosts HOSTS] [–sudo] [–become] [–user USER] role positional arguments: role optional arguments: -h, –help show this help message and exit –verbose, -v –gather, -g –no-gather, -G –extra-vars EXTRA_VARS, -e EXTRA_VARS Inventory: -i INVENTORY, –inventory INVENTORY –hosts HOSTS, -H HOSTS Identity: –sudo, -s –become, -b –user USER, -u USER Example If you have a role roles/testrole that contains the following in tasks/main.