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Chapter 1. Introduction

This document has been created to help Red Hat OpenStack Platform partners in their efforts to integrate solutions with Red Hat OpenStack Platform director as the tool used to install and manage the deployment lifecycle of an OpenStack Platform environment. Integration with the director enables seamless adoption of your technology. You can find broad benefits in an optimization of resources, reduction in deployment times and reduction in lifecycle management costs.

Looking forward, OpenStack Platform director integration is a strong move toward providing rich integration with existing enterprise management systems and processes. Within the Red Hat product portfolio, tools such as CloudForms are expected to have visibility into director’s integrations and provide broader exposure for management of service deployment.

1.1. Partner Integration Overview

This guide aims to help partners integrate their software and hardware solutions in a manner that the director configures as a part of the Overcloud. This follows a workflow broken down into multiple sections that show how to perform certain integration tasks:

  • Architecture - An examination of some of the technologies the director uses to perform Overcloud creation and configuration.
  • Overcloud Images - The director writes a base image to each node in the Overcloud as a foundation for their node type. This section explains how to modify these images before deployment so that you can include drivers or software. This is useful for testing your drivers and configuration before contributing them upstream.
  • Configuration - The director configures each service on the Overcloud, primarily using Puppet modules. This section show how Puppet modules work and how they are used to configure the Overcloud.
  • Orchestration - The director uses a set of Heat templates to create and configure the Overcloud. This can also include custom environment files and Heat templates to modify the behaviour of the Overcloud configuration. This section focuses on creating such templates to enable custom configuration of the Overcloud. This also involves including Puppet configuration from the previous chapter.
  • Integration Points - The image that the director deploys contains the required OpenStack components and set of Puppet modules for the configuration. This section discusses some of the upstream projects for contributing your component drivers and Puppet modules. This ensures that Red Hat can test them and include them in future Red Hat OpenStack Platform distributions.
  • Examples - This chapter is the culmination of the knowledge from previous chapters to demonstrate how real world certified vendors currently integrate their projects into the Overcloud using the director. This includes some practical network and storage examples. This section is useful to help similar vendors integrate their own products into Red Hat OpenStack Platform’s ecosystem.

1.2. Partner Integration Requirements

You must meet several prerequisites before meaningful integration work can be completed with the director. These requirements are not limited to technical integration and also include various levels of partner solution documentation. The goal is to have a complete shared understanding of the entire integration so that Red Hat engineering, partner managers, and support resources can effectively support the work.

The first requirement is related to Red Hat OpenStack Platform solution certification. To be included with OpenStack Platform director, the partner solution must first be certified with Red Hat OpenStack Platform.