OpenStack and GuixOps (was: Re: Guix "ops")

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

David Thompson writes:

>> As discussed on IRC, I was unsure about OpenStack, but I’ll trust your
>> judgment.  Maybe Cyril can comment?
>
> I threw out OpenStack because it's a self-hostable, free software VM
> platform.  I'm open to any other platforms that will exercise the full
> range of capabilities that 'guix deploy' needs to be useful.

I'm starting to put some time into GuixOps and seeing how I can help
today.  Dave has pointed out that for now we should focus on testing
with VMs and containers, but that OpenStack will still be a useful
long-term goal.  As such, I talked to a friend of mine (Boris Bobrov)
who works on OpenStack as part of his dayjob.  He gave me this advice
and okayed me to posting the conversation to this list:

  <paroneayea> I'm interested in helping with the guixops adapter to             
               openstack, but I don't know really where to get started in        
               openstack land
  <paroneayea> do you have a good pointer on where to start?                     
  <breton> pong
  <breton> well, "openstack 101" will give some theoretical overview
  <breton> after that -- http://docs.openstack.org/developer/devstack/. Devstack   
           is a bash script that sets up bleeding edge openstack for you           
  <breton> big red warning: do not set it up on your laptop directly. Better       
           install a minimal ubuntu/centos in a vm and run devstack there          
  <breton> since you want to do something with guix, my guess is that you need     
           to pay attention to the following openstack components: nova (the       
           thing that brings up a VM), glance (image registry, stores metadata     
           about objects), swift (stores data), maybe murano (it my company's      
           component, it has something to do with app deployment to VMs)           
  <breton> official docs are very good too, btw: http://docs.openstack.org/        
  <breton> a very brief overview of what's going on in openstack: you tell nova    
           to bring up a vm, nova fetches image from glance (glance fetches it     
           from swift or from some other storage), fetches networking info from    
           neutron, fetches list of disks from cinder, connects it alltogether     
           and gives you a vm. Every operation if authenticated by keystone.       

It looks like Nova (OpenStack Compute) is the main thing we'll end up
targeting.  Some links:

 - Nix peoples' wiki page on the subject:
     https://nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_and_OpenStack_Compute
 - Nova's main page:
     http://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-compute/
 - Python library, which we may want to examine to make a Guile library
   equiv:
     https://github.com/openstack/python-novaclient

I figured it's best to document this on the list while I'm looking into
it.  Hope that helps!

 - Chris