Okay, so I guess I’ll start ready: okay, hello! There. My name is machi Hoshino and I’ll, be talking by the title of build your own web portal using OpenStack, api’s and services here, okay, so this will be the outline of my presentation in the introduction I’ll try to explain why I prepared this session today and on The second chapter from a user perspective I’ll try to explain what OpenStack means to us and then why and how we build web portals on top of OpenStack and our future plans and the summary okay.
So Who am I umm again? My name is Michiko Shino on the slide there I believe in pink. You can see for kanji letters. Limit slope is small, but that’s how I write my name in Japanese. If you’re aware of Japan, all countries have meaning they, they mean starfield, truth and knowledge. Well, thank you. I work at a company called IBM systems, engineering, Japan and I believe you all know the first three letters.
But yes, we are a subsidiary of the IBM group. However, usually we are called IFE in Japan because of the first letters of IBM systems. Engineering, my company is located at a pre fixture called Chiba. If you know about Japan, if you’re really familiar with it, it’s actually close to Tokyo and I put a picture of the building that I work at and the colleagues that I work with. So what do I do? In the past? I used to support IBM power systems.
Now I don’t believe everyone knows that, but it is IBM’s proprietary, mid-range servers and I worked in that field for like five years now, I support clients, designing and building cloud environments and although I do suffer a lot products these days, I spent a lot of time. Sporting openstack and I’ve listed the clients that I and we we meaning is II, worked with these clients and vote include mismo bank Toshiba, keyring and Jeffrey steel corporation okay.
So before I really go into the details, I thought this was a great opportunity to show how OpenStack is doing in Japan and last year, 2015 was a great year, as all of you probably remember, we had our last of Miss on the stack summit at Tokyo On October, I was actually there as a listener and I’m very overwhelmed that I’m back here as a speaker – and the second point is that I believe some of you have already got it the certification program.
I believe that community now has a global program, but in Japan we have our own program, which is called opsal, which stands for certify exam for OpenStack professionals, and this was also started at October on 2015 and last but not least, we’re seeing a tremendous growth in The IP market IDC analysis are saying that we will see a hundred fourteen percent per year, growth in the IKEA market in OpenStack, and I put a graph on there.
The last part is 2019, but you can see it’s getting big and you can see that OpenStack is now getting very popular in Japan, so you may wonder what the clients are really getting from OpenStack come on this slide. I’ve listed some of the clients that IBM japan worked with and the outcomes they got from OpenStack Toshiba. They built a service, many on top of OpenStack and they’ve achieved flexibility and rapid deployment.
Cheering and I believe this a very big number, but they have reduced your single server casa on 75 % and JP’s to a corporation they’re, estimating that their system build will reduce from two months to ten days, which is again if you calculate that it’s about. Like 80 percent, so you can see that a lot of our clients are getting positive outcomes from OpenStack, so in Japan, nope mistake is doing great.
I feel that a lot of our clients are really getting interested in this technology. I get a lot of calls. I’ve spent busy weeks I’m very confident that this technology well now, of course not only in Japan, will be widely deployed in this IT industry. So why am I standing here today? I believe because of the my session title. I believe a lot of people are expecting that I’m going to talk about web portals – and I am going to talk about that.
But the real message that I want to share is what’s written about here and it’s a story about what we did after installing OpenStack. As all of you know, OpenStack is now very popular. Clients are getting access to the out-of-the-box OpenStack features, but we have seen that as they float around with those features they start to bump into the question that well, how can we use these features to really get the best out of OpenStack? So today I would like to share my experience, working with clients and really arguing with this issue and the one answer we got, which was to build web portals on top of it.
Ok, so this is what I’m going to talk about today, since it’s already here, but since OpenStack has become widely popular in Japan. I believe that we now need to explore how we can use OpenStack. So in this session I will try from a user perspective. Recap on what OpenStack is and with demos, I will share our motivation for building web portals on top of the OpenStack I’ll, try to explain what that drawing means towards the end of this session.
Ok, what is the OpenStack now? This may become very embarrassing because I’m going to try to explain what OpenStack is when there’s probably a lot of experts in this room, but I’m not going to do this because I feel pleasure of being embarrassed, though, instead of I’m going to do this to show How I understand what OpenStack is and it’ll be a lot easier for me to explain why that led to the idea of building web portals on top of it, since this is very basic stuff, some people may get bored, be patient.
Elves show you the demo. After about like in 10 minutes, okay, so, okay, so what is OpenStack? I believe this is a very simple question, but we have multiple answers for this from the keynotes. I believe that there are multiple perspectives for this question. My answer is: OpenStack abstracts, compute network and storage. That’s it now. What does that mean in the slide? I wrote a layer called application now.
Imagine that this application is something that you want to write to control your IT resources and IT hardware’s. If we have OpenStack, this application only needs to care about the OpenStack. Api’s OpenStack will convert those api’s to the actual hardware api’s opus. That has multiple projects. I believe you know that, but I, for example, know Berglas Neutron. They all provide different functionalities, but what they all have in common is that they let you control your IT resources without caring.
What it actually is, meaning that I don’t have to care if it’s KVM or VMware. So when I explained this to clients, they get the responses on well. Why does that have to be done by OpenStack? Well from an application point of view, I believe there’s a lots of good stops when OpenStack exists. The first point is that OpenStack, first of all provides a out-of-the-box framework for integrating computing networking storage.
If we do not have OpenStack, I have to write every procedure to control their Hardware on the application, meaning like, for example, creating VLANs assigning IP sculling LUNs, assigning those lands, the hypervisors formatting, those lands, blah blah blah. If I have OpenStack, all of that will be merged into a single, simple API which is over boot, and that will save a lot of time building these type of applications.
And the second point is that, since OpenStack is now very popular instead of just having your OpenStack instance on your own data centers, we can have open access to weak, have access to OpenStack for from public services, for example, IBM now has a private Maj cloud service Called blue box so, theoretically, if I once write a application based on OpenStack api’s, I can move this application to any OpenStack platforms and the last point is, since a lot of vendors have helped develop OpenStack drivers with no code change.
We can access proprietary hardware solutions. So what this means is that, with the Nova boot API, I can control KVM instances and para VM, which is IBM’s proprietary, personalization solutions, so you can see from an application point of view, opens that provides a lot of good points. So I talked about the good things about OpenStack. Now I’m going to talk about what we should consider about now when I say OpenStack, revised abstraction to compute network storage, I’m only talking about the core of the OpenStack and I believe OpenStack is not just.
I asked and I brought the big tent picture. I believe a lot of people know this if they have touched OpenStack, but what this really means that when we look that project there is two things. There’s core services in big tent and in the core services are the projects that have a very long history and provide the basic highest functions, which is the compute network and storage. And when we look outside of the core services, we have a world called big, tent and well.
When we look at these projects, as we see like, for example, Sahara, which provides Hadoop as a service and trove as in database as a service. So you can see that OpenStack is now not just a high yes, but so when I explained about the big tent to my clients, I know I’m exaggerating this, but I always get some responses very close to this. So, since OpenStack is very happy that me has a lot of functions, we sometimes assume that well, if we is still OpenStack all the problems we have will magically go away, which I believe a lot of people know that that’s not correct so can OpenStack solve.
Everything. Is there people that says? Yes, I believe who says yes: okay, there’s no one, so the answer is probably no and for a long time. I believe this will be no and why well, because each project have different maturities, I’m glad that the community now provides the OpenStack project navigator. But when we look at this, we realized that projects that have the high majority are mostly the core services.
The big dam projects horizon and heat have high majority, but all the other projects they’re still in the progress of development, and the second point is that not everything is implemented. Openstack, for example, when I talk to clients, they usually say that they want to trace to each user’s activities, meaning like they want to trace. They want to know personally egg build how many VMs on this week, personally Vav you destroy it.
How many beers on this week, I believe, see the mayor is supposed to do that, but I never really got that to work um and the third and last point I saved the clients that opens that cannot solve. Everything is because OpenStack is difficult. I’ll talk to you about the next slide, but so I said that OpenStack abstracts, compute and networking storage. Now, why can that make it difficult? I say: OpenStack is difficult and difficult to the users that just want the services.
For example, let’s say: there’s a user that says I want a WordPress server. I I want to create an awesome web block with using WordPress servers and he goes into his OpenStack server and if OpenStack is really wise and just says, hey here’s your WordPress server. I believe that is easy, but in reality what we really need to do to get the WordPress are working on. The OpenStack is to really follow these princes procedures to really get it, and so what I really want to say is that OpenStack has made things a lot easier.
Then I knew then I started working on power systems. However, it’s the benefit is really for the people that were maintaining and operating the IT hardware, and I believe, there’s still a lot of people that really don’t care about ID hardware. They only care about applications and for those people the OpenStack is too difficult. We need to make OpenStack much easier. We need to abstract OpenStack.
So what is OpenStack whatever I want to say in this chapter is that first of all, OpenStack, abstracts, computer, networking, so storage and, like I said OpenStack – does not solve everything and OpenStack is difficult difficult for the people that just want the services. So when we develop solutions on top of books and stack, these are the things that we need to consider about. Ok, so how do we do that? So I finally go back to my title on building your will and web portals.
So in the last chapter, I’ve talked about the good things about OpenStack and the considerations. Now, how do we overcome that? I believe there are three points for this. The first point is to let’s provide a service perspective web interface, meaning that this is the weapon. I’r talking about, and we really have to care that this is not Verizon. We are not going to show everything. What opens that can do to the users.
We’re just going to use, show the things that the people really care about. So first, let’s provide it weapons. Your face and to when I talk to OpenStack a lot of customers, they tend to use functions that are really instill in the progress of development. So I always tell my customers if you want to start using OpenStack start with the basic functions which are the computer networking storage. I have a customer ID.
I wasn’t involved with this customer, but I have a. I had a customer complaining that he was trying to work a DVR solution which, which only started – and he complained that me that it’s not working, he doesn’t get, never connect connectivity and at the end I told him well, why didn’t you use DVR? He he started using DVR on VLAN, so why didn’t you do that? Why well is it started more easier? So my I always tell my clients that if you’re starting OpenStack start easy start only using compute network and storage, so now, what do we do with the functions that are not computing? Networking storage when we look around this OpenStack is not the only automation tool.
For example, for software installation, I believe a lot of people use chef, puppet estable for project management, maybe read mine. My answer is that why don’t we just combine all these softwares and make it into our own cloud environment? Now I make this sound easy from the keynotes. I was actually very amazed from the ATM tease, but I believe a lot of people are trying to do this they’re trying to really integrate a lot of the tools and make it into a single application.
But what’s when I talk to clients, I believe this is the most hardest part, because now I’m involving multiple technologies, for example in this charm, I’m involving a web application interface and the OpenStack and chef puppet in decibel. So it’s really hard to imagine how this all works together and all the clients that I work with. In the end, we always have to argue to how to combine the things that are not OpenStack so today, to give you a better understanding of what I just explained.
I brought myself a demo application this demo application. First of all, it’s a article, I’m sorry! I didn’t, I didn’t believe the demo gods, but this is a demo application, it’s a article and it was built by my team back in Japan and it is really a blend of all the ideas. We’ve got really arguing with our clients. Now, where you’re, what you are going to about to see it’s not for production, they’re, still funny things about the user interface, but it’s only built by the purpose to be to give you a better understanding of what I’ve just explained.
So, let’s I’ll just show you the article first and go into the technical details later. So, let’s think of a very simple scenario. A guy named member says that I want a WordPress server and he logs into his web portal, and he does his customization. Like saying I want, I wanted to make a scale. I wanted three servers in load-balancing and before he gets his server in this demo, I will have a approver approve his request and after it gets approved, he gets his server okay.
So let me switch to the article okay, so so, first of all, I will login to my web web portal and I’m entering the URL and there’s a screen coli bean cloud. Reassured I’ll! Tell you what this is after the article, but I’m going to log in there and wait. Well. I have an awesome web block plan, so I’m going to get a wordpress, so I press the WordPress request and what happens? Is it’s actually me for some basic informations? I’r just going to drill down this, I’m not going to think too much about this and, as you see now, if I and now it’s asking me me how many web servers and how many database servers I want for this.
So I’ll just say three servers. Add some memory on it and boot has some disk on it and for the database server. It’s asking me for additional disk, so I’ll, just add 100 gigabytes and now press next, and so now we have a page. That’s asking for the attributes for the WordPress server and the database I’ll enter a name kolya c DB and here’s fancy feature it’s asking for the load, balancer configurations and I’m just going to really drill down the choices and – and I choose HTTP and I’m going to Ask hey so, since this is a demo, I’m going to enter a very crazy port number one, two three four: five and 192 168 0.
85 for the external access. Please remember this you’ll see this after and then I think it next and now I have I’ll show you a very fancy feature that says: show heat template now. What that did was actually create automatically created a heat template from the user input. I just did I’ll explain this after this, but you can see that one web server is there. Two web servers there and diddled three web servers, so this template is actually automatically created and then I press request so now I’m waiting for the approver to approve this.
So now now a male goes through the approver. This is actually a mail server but – and he says, hey dear approver, a new wordpress request has revived, please login and so ok, I login. Now I’m going to log into this portal as the approver and then what happens is there’s a box says, claim tasks and I can see the same request that was done by the member’ guy and then well I’ll just say I approve and what happens after this Is now the server gets provisioned, and now I now all, I only have to wait for the servers to get ready.
Well, since there’s a little bit of software configuration I’m going to cut this, but it’s not like an error process. If I could see this ok, so you can see, that’s it only to collect five minutes so and if I click the new mail, it’s telling me that your server is ready and you can see the crazy port number one. Two three four: five that I entered in the screen and if I click that I get my WordPress server now I can create my awesome web blog now.
The scenario ends here in real cases he’s just going to create my blogs with this, but I believe we are OpenStack hacker. So, let’s see what happened in the OpenStack side, now I’m going to log in to Horizon now in real cases. We should not let the user log in, but this is just for demo, so I’m just going to log in there, but this is the IBM version of a horizon. Don’t don’t be obstructive with that? It’s the basically the same thing, but it’s when we log in and there’s an orchestration stacks, and you can see that there’s a staff created there, five minutes and if I look at that, you can see that it created a very complex structure of heat template.
But it’s really the same thing that you saw on the show heat tape, a template button and well. I believe you can’t compare it, but it is the same thing that you saw in the previous show heat template button. And if I look at the events I can see all the events worked. Fine and, like I said I could hear little bouncers, let’s see if it’s working right, so three Webster remembers and so I’m just going to delete two members since I’ve have one member left.
I could I still should have access and I still have access to that. So I’m going to delete the last member and I believe it’s just just a little bit of cash. But after two reloads you can see that the server is now unavailable. So you can see always working nice okay, so let me explain what you’ve just saw that demo was a combination of OpenStack used. As I asked configuration and chef used for software configuration as you have saw, an open stack heat was heavily used for this demo and for the service UI.
I use the proprietary software called IBM cloud Orchestrator now in the IBM we usually call this ICO, but I see there is a great product. It helps you create that type of web application very easily with OpenStack api’s. Now, since we built it on ICO, this demo, application will only work with iceo, but the basic ideas, I believe, will work on any type of web application platform anyway. Some so, instead of the three points to have to get the best out of openness that we implemented, some fancy features to show.
What opens that can do, and the first feature is what you just saw: the automatic heat template creation. Now, for those of you who don’t know like how many people know what heat is. Okay, I believe a lot of people know that so for the people that don’t know what heat is it’s a technology that is used for template based deployments for those of you who know what heat is, how many people have ever write a heat template by theirselves Texted it how many people use text editor just from that? Okay, a lot of people whose text editors so or now, people use text editors for this, but instead in this demo we created a UI template converter, meaning that that template was automatically created on the input of the service portal and for software configuration we use chef And to connect heat with chef, we use a module called cloud config cloud, config um, I believe a lot of people.
Some people know that some people doesn’t know this, but their cloud config has a module that can connect chefs and executes chef’s recipes at default. I believe two days ago, and there was a session called metadata, do’s and don’ts. That was, and they talked about this so if you’re very interested, I believe you should look at that, but and another feature that I’ll talk about is the automatic helicopter.
So what does that mean? I’r the screen that you saw that I the screen that I drill down, it’s actually built by OpenStack api’s and chef api’s. There is no hard coding involved in that. So if I update the OpenStack environment and chef environment that cap, that UI is going to be updated, um so I’ll show you a demo about that. This is a very short demo, but ok! So I’m back to the scene where I entered the first screen and I believe that a lot of you forgot forgot this, but this is a part where I entered a new DB name like I said this is automatically created from chefs API.
So, let’s look at the chef’s server part um. This people who know it’s a chef server web GUI and I place edit and they’re safe. The practice has default attributes and if I did look at that, I see my sequel values with four about attributes on that, and it is the same thing that I see in this screen. So if I update this, I should see the same thing. So I’m going to update a new attribute, that’s called test and give it a default value test and save that value.
And what happens is I go back and reload the screen? I see the same thing so you can see there is no hard calling involved and these features are really created from chef, api’s, ok, and the last thing I’m I want to short share is that, since this demo, application is based on OpenStack and chef api’s, I’m Able to run through alkie, I am able to run this on any environment. If I have OpenStack and chef, I’m going to show you a very short demo of that.
Ok. So I’m back to the part where I approve the request. I press claim tasks and I see the approval again so I’m going to press approve now in the previous demo. I’ve shown you the horizon interface, but let’s go deeper. What hypervisor was I running yet, and I believe this is very rare, but this demo was actually working at a VMware environment. Now I say this is probably rare because I believe a lot of people are using KVM for their hypervisors, but as I’ve explained OpenStack abstracts that if I use if I built this on OpenStack api’s, I don’t have to care if it’s KVM or VMware.
So you can see that well, it’s now actually creating cinder volumes and it’s doing it by myself, and this is the vSphere client. If you know about that I’ve, if you know about BML, I believe a lot of people know what this is but and you can see that it’s automatically creating all the stuffs without any user interactions. So you can see that this demo application can work on any type of hypervisors and it will just keep on going so I’ll.
Just stop the demo here, but okay, so I think I have ten minutes left so on the screenshot. What what is this um? This is a screenshot of a application that is really close to what I’ve just saw shown, but it’s working at a para VM environment. What was that? Okay? And I say this is very close, because this is not for demo purposes. We are actually trying to create this application for a real customer for production use, so you can see it.
It does a lot of complex things than just provisioning, WordPress servers, for example it’s in this application. I can’t show you the details, but it is trying to configure a clustering software using shared disks, and so what I wanted to say is that this technology we can use it on any type of hypervisors and we can use it even on production environments. I do have a demo article for this on, if you’re very interested on you, I can show you through my laptop so um.
Okay. Is it okay? Okay? So this? Let me summarize this chapter. I’ve talked that there are three points to get the best out of OpenStack and that’s what’s written there and with my demo application. I’r very glad if you got a better an if you’re. If you got the highly saying I’m sorry, I’ve read English, but if you got the idea of that and with that demo application, one more thing I really want to say is that.
Well, I get clients asking me: what’s the best thing about OpenStack and I tell them: api’s are the best thing with those api’s. I can really connect these multiple technologies and make it look like a single, unified application. You can see that in the demo application. I really connected OpenStack and chef, so ok, so let’s just go on home, I’m bleep! I have a little more time. So let me talk about what we’re trying to do now and what we are trying to show to our customers on its and then this part is basically about infrastructure testing.
We get a lot of requests from our customers that they want to automate testings. What testing means um, I believe, a lot of people before going on production. A lot of people enter a lot of commands. Seeing that everything is working right and say: ok, now you can go on production. A lot of our customers say that they want to automate that, because their system is getting much more complex and this is taking a lot of time.
So I would like to share my opinion for this, so why do we do testings in the first place? So we do testings, because there is how it should look and how it actually is, and we want to see that there is no difference between those things and maybe advance. Customers are always have already systemize this, but I believe a lot of customers are using Excel. Spreadsheets or Word documents to really maintain how it should look and from those informations operators and rewrite them to commands and execute each command.
So how do we systemize this, and if I can achieve the environment, that I showed you in the previous demo, how it should look like are all in the OpenStack heat templates and chef recipes. Our team back in Japan are trying to create automated test scripts from that information. Here we are trying to use service background for those who don’t know how many people know a server spec. Ok, so there’s a lot of people um server spec.
It was built by a Japanese engineer. It’s this isn’t really used for testing purposes. If you write a spec file, this is written and, oh, my god, I forgot the language. I believe it’s in Ruby if I’m wrong a bit, maybe at some 100 get married. Thank you and it’s really in Ruby, it’s called spec file and it sure respect eats those files and they do test automatically. Currently, we are trying to create those spec files automatically from information from heap templates and chef recipes.
Sorry we’re trying to do that um. I did get reports that some of these are working. Some of these are not, I hope, someday. We are able to show this, but what I really wanted to say that if we can really automate everything for our IT provisioning, we can really make these things work and create all these all and automate all these testings and operations. Ok, so that’s as my session. I think I talked a lot of today, but in summary, what I wanted to talk is that OpenStack abstracts computing networking storage and it does not solve everything we need to build something on top of it.
So we built a web portal to overcome these considerations and, like I’ve said when we really build these type of solutions. Api’s are really the keys with those API, so we can really connect a lot of technologies, multiple technologies and make it look as it is a single application. Ok, that is the end of my presentation. I believe I still have time for questions sure when you talk about the API. Is that are you directly using the REST? Api? Ok, yes, no CL is um.
You see, I means that we’re not using Python key clients. We are using actually in REST, API and the alright, so the list that you saw are really: we are using javascript to really look at those JSON files and the builds are created and parsed from those attributes. Yeah, okay and the other thing is so you know you provide a bed portal, for you know your end users, but is there a need for you providing you know api’s to them for automating their tasks like instead of going through web portal called APN? You know build up spin up a cluster of something.
Oh sorry, the question I believe was so I built a web portal did. Do we need API for that web portal? I do get requests for that. The product IBM Cloud Orchestrator already has that function, so it it does have a REST API interface. I can make it work without and drink those values. Yes, okay. I believe he was first I’m just looking at this. You said: there’s this dependency on the IBM orchestrate product.
Did you consider extending horizon in order to add functionality? Yes, well, so the question was how about extending the horizon? Well, we really when we work with clients, we realized that people don’t use horizon. I’r saying this because to us, I believe, in the room in the room. I believe a lot of people say that horizon looks easy, but clients that don’t know OpenStack horizon is still too hard.
They say that I don’t know what to do with this kind of what I’m driving at right and did you consider taking the framework that was available on horizon and then putting your easier workflows in there with you know the templating, auto defined values and sensible defaults. Okay, so you probably saying that you, but why didn’t you write extensions on top of horizon yeah? First of all, I didn’t know how to do that.
That was a, I believe, there’s a session about that tomorrow. Um the I believe it was an angularjs assessment. So if I maybe if I know about that, maybe I’ll try that alternative, but currently I did it, I used IBM cloud Orchestrator. Thank you for your presentation, I’m curious where your team thinks they can go in the future as far as creating applications on top of OpenStack right now, we’re seeing a lot of things that are still kind of in the analytics orchestration management part of the realm right.
I’r wondering where you see active going in the future okay, so so this is a question about app. Creating applications on top is not the only answer or reason, there’s a lot of things that we can do with OpenStack. Why do you believe that creating applications is the good thing? Is that the question sure okay? So well, it’s a I’ll just go back to a few slides on, so we good slide. Okay. So when we look at OpenStack like I’ve said, OpenStack is only an.
I us provider, so we need to really I mean, and what I see is that there’s a lot of things other than the OpenStack that customers have, for example they want to after provision they want to change some network configurations and networks which does have REST API Interfaces and they want to really connect that so when we have to do that, I believe that we should really connect connect all those api’s, and so we should build a application on top, but really extend it and connect all the IT resources that we have in Our data centers, so I believe, of course, using as it for how to say I’m Big Data IOT.
I believe it’s a good answer, but I believe that building application is one of the key features for IT. Provisioning. Is that yes right? Thank you any questions. Okay. I believe them. Thank you very much. This is ver honor
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