This page describes the technical motivations behind MicroStack, a second generation OpenStack solution, with Charmed OpenStack being the first generation.
The last decade
Over the last ten years, the OpenStack Charms project has developed a successful and proven set of tooling using Juju in conjunction with MAAS and LXD to deploy and operate OpenStack for both public and private cloud deployments.
However, this solution has not proven to be a good fit for smaller footprint deployments due to the infrastructure overheads of Juju and MAAS.
This set of use cases is the target for the first release of MicroStack, which has provided a beta-grade solution for single and small multi-node deployments without incurring the overheads of Juju and MAAS. However, it compromises by not having the same set of operational semantics as an OpenStack charm deployed cloud.
Technology evolution
As expected, technology has evolved over the same period of time.
The new paradigm for managing applications in the form of Kubernetes (K8S) has proven itself as a production-grade solution. Juju has also grown to support deploying and managing applications on K8S using Charms (Charmed K8S Operators). The image-based approach that K8S brings results in fully repeatable deployment and faster, more reliable upgrades.
Ubuntu has introduced the concept of Snap packages, which provide an image-based approach for deploying applications directly to servers with full sandboxing, fast upgrades, and rollback in the event of upgrade failure.
A reflection point
How can we leverage the features of the evolved technology around us to improve the experience of deploying and operating OpenStack, while ensuring we can support all use cases - from a single node running in a virtual machine on a developer’s laptop to large deployments of thousands of physical servers in data centres?
The majority of the OpenStack Control Plane (API and RPC services, Web Apps, Databases) is a great candidate for deployment and operation on Kubernetes. However, hypervisor and storage components are not; they are still best placed directly onto the bare metal.
By using Juju and Charmed Operators to manage both K8S and machine deployment components, and making use of a concept called cross-model relations, we can apply the same set of operational semantics that have proven so useful in the OpenStack Charms to manage a hybrid container/machine-based deployment. This approach leverages the image-based approach of both K8S and Snaps to improve repeatability and speed of upgrades.
Sunbeam
Sunbeam is the project that provides the core set of technology in the form of Charmed Operators, Snaps, and OCI containers of OpenStack components. These can be assembled into small single and multi-node deployments with lightweight overheads or used with platforms such as MAAS to enable fully automated deployment of large-scale OpenStack clouds.