Heat is the core project in the OpenStack orchestration program.
It implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code. A native Heat template format is evolving, but Heat also aims to provide compatibility with the AWS CloudFormation template format, so that many existing CloudFormation templates can be launched on OpenStack. Heat provides both an OpenStack-native ReST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API.
Rico Lin offered this tutorial on how to auto-scale a self-healing cluster with Heat at the recent OpenInfra Days in Vietnam. Lin has been the project team lead for Heat in the Rocky, Pike and Queens cycles as well as a Heat core contributor member since the Liberty release. He’s currently a software engineer at EasyStack.
Here he walks you through how to configure Heat, set up Heat container agents before discussing options for auto-scaling, choosing your structure and then launching a self-healing cluster.
For the full 14-minute demo see below and check out his slides here.
Get involved
Check out the Heat self-healing special interest group (SIG). The auto-scaling templates for Heat can be found at GitHub.
The developers use IRC in #heat
on Freenode for development discussion.
Meetings
Meetings are held on IRC in #heat
on Freenode every Wednesday. See the Heat agenda page for times and details.
Mailing list
Discussions about Heat happen on the openstack-dev mailing list. Please use the tag [Heat]
in the subject line for new threads.
Getting started guides
There are guides for a number of distributions available in the Heat Documentation
The installation guides on http://docs.openstack.org
- Getting Started With Heat on Fedora
- Getting Started With Heat on Ubuntu
- Heat and Devstack
- Heat chapter of the OpenStack Clients Guide
Development