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Dissecting TripleO service templates (part 1)

The purpose of this blog post is to dissect TripleO service templates and explain what each part does and why it’s there.

Please note that it’s important to know how to write Heat templates before continuing this guide; else you’re gonna be quite confused and won’t get the most benefit out of this.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, all the service definitions for TripleO live in tripleo-heat-templates. At the time of writing this, we have three main directories where we can find these service definitions:

• puppet/services/

• docker/services/

• extraconfig/services/

But, looking at the services in these directories can be quite confusing… Even knowing that the role_data output is the main thing, and that it has several options, it’s hard to discern what all these sections actually do; which are mandatory and which are optional; and even, in what cases are parameters mandatory and in which cases they aren’t. There’s a lot of legacy in these templates, and so, I thought trying to give some explanation for them would be a good idea.

What’s the bare-minimum?

Before, digging into details, it’s always good to know what the bare-minimum is. So lets look at a very minimal service template, rhsm.yaml

heat_template_version: rocky

description: Configure Red Hat Subscription Management.

parameters:
  RoleNetIpMap:
    default: {}
    type: json
  ServiceData:
    default: {}
    description: Dictionary packing service data
    type: json
  ServiceNetMap:
    default: {}
    description: Mapping of service_name -> network name. Typically set
                 via parameter_defaults in the resource registry.  This
                 mapping overrides those in ServiceNetMapDefaults.
    type: json
  DefaultPasswords:
    default: {}
    type: json
  RoleName:
    default: ''
    description: Role name on which the service is applied
    type: string
  RoleParameters:
    default: {}
    description: Parameters specific to the role
    type: json
  EndpointMap:
    default: {}
    description: Mapping of service endpoint -> protocol. Typically set
                 via parameter_defaults in the resource registry.
    type: json
  RhsmVars:
    default: {}
    description: Hash of ansible-role-redhat-subscription variables
                 used to configure RHSM.
    # The parameters contains sensible data like activation key or password.
    hidden: true
    tags:
      - role_specific
    type: json

resources:
  # Merging role-specific parameters (RoleParameters) with the default parameters.
  # RoleParameters will have the precedence over the default parameters.
  RoleParametersValue:
    type: OS::Heat::Value
    properties:
      type: json
      value:
        map_replace:
          - map_replace:
            - vars: RhsmVars
            - values: {get_param: [RoleParameters]}
          - values:
              RhsmVars: {get_param: RhsmVars}

outputs:
  role_data:
    description: Role data for the RHSM service.
    value:
      service_name: rhsm
      config_settings:
        tripleo::rhsm::firewall_rules: {}
      upgrade_tasks: []
      step_config: ''
      host_prep_tasks:
        - name: Red Hat Subscription Management configuration
          vars: {get_attr: [RoleParametersValue, value, vars]}
          block:
          - include_role:
              name: redhat-subscription

Lets go piece by piece and explain what’s going on.

Version and description

As with any other heat template, you do need to specify the heat_template_version, and preferably give a description of what the stack/template does.

Parameters

You’ll notice that there are a bunch of heat parameters defined in this template that are not necessarily used. This is because service templates are created in the form of a heat resource chain object. This type of objects can create a “chain” or a set of objects with the same parameters, and gather the outputs of them. So, eventually we pass the same mandatory parameters to the chain. This happens in the common/services.yaml file. Lets take a look and see how this is called:

  ServiceChain:
    type: OS::Heat::ResourceChain
    properties:
      resources: {get_param: Services}
      concurrent: true
      resource_properties:
        ServiceData: {get_param: ServiceData}
        ServiceNetMap: {get_param: ServiceNetMap}
        EndpointMap: {get_param: EndpointMap}
        DefaultPasswords: {get_param: DefaultPasswords}
        RoleName: {get_param: RoleName}
        RoleParameters: {get_param: RoleParameters}

Here we can see that the mandatory parameters for the services are the following:

• ServiceData: Contains an entry called net_cidr_map, which is a map that has the CIDRs for each network in your deployment.

• ServiceNetMap: Contains a mapping that tells you what network is each service configured at. Typical entries will look like: BarbicanApiNetwork: internal_api.

• EndpointMap: Contains the keystone endpoints for each service. With this you’ll be able to get what port, what protocol, and even different entries for the public, internal and admin endpoints.

• DefaultPasswords: Defines the default passwords for only some of the services… Namely, the following parameters are available through here: DefaultMysqlRootPassword, DefaultRabbitCookie, DefaultHeatAuthEncryptionKey, DefaultPcsdPassword, DefaultHorizonSecret. Note that TripleO usually will autogenerate the passwords with secure, randomly generated defaults, so this is barely used.

• RoleName: This is the name of the role on which the service is applied. It could be one of the default roles (e.g. “Controller” or “Compute”), or a custom role, depending on how you’re deploying.

• RoleParameters: A Map containing parameters to be applied to the specific role.

So, if you’re writing a service template yourself, these are the parameters you have to copy into your template.

Aside from these parameters, you can define any other parameter yourself for the service, and in order for your service to consume the parameter, you need to pass them via parameter_defaults.

The role_data output

This is the sole output that will be read and parsed in order to get the relevant information needed from your service. It’s value must be a map, and from the aforementioned example, it minimally contains the following:

• service_name: This is the name of the service you’re configuring. The format is lower case letters and underscores. Setting this is quite important, since this is how TripleO reports what services are enabled, and generates appropriate hieradata, such as a list of all services enabled, and flags that say that your service is enabled on a certain node.

• config_settings: This will contain a map of key value pairs; the map will be written to the hosts in the form of hieradata, which puppet can then run and use to configure your service. Note that the hieradata will only be written on hosts that are tagged with a role that enables your service.

• upgrade_tasks: These are ansible tasks that run when TripleO is running an upgrade with your service enabled. If you don’t have any upgrade tasks to do, you still have to specify this output, but it’s enough to set it as an empty list.

• step_config: This defines what puppet manifest should be run to configure your service. It typically is a string with the specific include statement that puppet will run. If you’re not configuring your service with puppet, then you need to set this value as an empty string. There is an exception, however: When you’re configuring a containerized service. We’ll dig into that later.

These are the bare-minimum sections of role_data you need to set up. However, you might have noticed that the example I linked above has another section called host_prep_data. This section is not mandatory, but it is one of the several ways you can execute Ansible tasks on the host in order to configure your service. These options powered by Ansible will be covered in the next part of this series.

Also note if the service is executing its configuration on bare-metal, step_config will execute in steps. So it’s important that the puppet manifests take steps into account (which you will note in the manifests in puppet-tripleo). If you want to understand what steps does TripleO execute, check out my blog post about it

tags: tripleo - openstack

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