OpenStack Summit November 2013

Deployment of large enterprise applications is a complex problem. Such applications consist of numerous software components spread across multiple VMs with a variety of dependencies between them, and require a large number of configuration parameters to be specified. Pattern technologies such as OpenStack Heat help automate the deployment of distributed applications. However, Heat in its current form only has limited supported for software orchestration to address the aforemenionted issues. Furthermore, especially for application components initial deployment is just the begining and more orchestration is necessary throughout the comlete lifecycle of an application to consider aspects such as high availability, storage and network configurations.

In this session we will discuss automated deployment and maintenance of enterprise applications using OpenStack Heat. Our talk will foucs on the following issues and how they can be addressed using base Heat capabilities together with extensions to the Heat engine.

1. Enterprise application deployment:

1.1. complete declarative specification of application model;
1.2. cross component dependencies; and
1.3. software stack configuration and coordination.
2. Enterprise application maintainance:

2.1. virtual machine high availability;
2.2. storage; and
2.3. network.