Using OpenStack with Juju

Although Juju doesn't have baked-in knowledge of your OpenStack cloud, it does know how such clouds work in general. We just need to provide some information to add it to the list of known clouds.

Image metadata

OpenStack requires access to images for its instances to use. If you have chosen to use a private OpenStack cloud with Juju you will need to ensure that images are set up. This is covered in Cloud image metadata.

Adding an OpenStack Cloud

Use the add-cloud command to interactively add your OpenStack cloud to Juju's list of clouds. You will need to supply a name you wish to call your cloud and the unique API endpoint, the authentication type(s), and region information.

This command recognises the below variables. Any values found will show up as default values when the interactive mode is used. For clarity, the corresponding prompts are given in parentheses:

OS_AUTH_URL (cloud API endpoint URL)
OS_CACERT (path to the CA certificate file)
OS_REGION_NAME (region)

These are typically defined in a file called novarc. Have your shell source it (e.g. source novarc) prior to invoking add-cloud.

For the manual method of adding an OpenStack cloud, see below section Manually adding an OpenStack cloud.

juju add-cloud

Example user session:

Cloud Types
  lxd
  maas
  manual
  openstack
  vsphere

Select cloud type: openstack

Enter a name for your openstack cloud: myopenstack

Enter the API endpoint url for the cloud [https://x.x.x.x:5000/v3]:

Enter the filename of the CA certificate to access OpenStack cloud (optional) [/home/ubuntu/cacert.pem]:

Auth Types
  access-key
  userpass

Select one or more auth types separated by commas: userpass

Enter region name: dev1

Enter the API endpoint url for the region [use cloud api url]:

Enter another region? (Y/n): n

Successfully read CA Certificate from /home/ubuntu/test_certs/cacert.pem
Cloud "myopenstack" successfully added

You will need to add credentials for this cloud (`juju add-credential myopenstack`)
before creating a controller (`juju bootstrap myopenstack`).

Note that it is possible to choose more than one authorisation method - just separate the values with commas.

Now confirm the successful addition of the cloud:

juju clouds

Here is a partial output:

Cloud        Regions  Default          Type        Description
.
.
.
myopenstack        1  dev1             openstack

Manually adding an OpenStack cloud

This section shows how to manually add an OpenStack cloud to Juju (see Adding clouds manually for background information). It also demonstrates how multiple authentication types can be allowed (comma-separated).

The manual method necessitates the use of a YAML-formatted configuration file. Here is an example:

clouds:
    mystack:
      type: openstack
      auth-types: [access-key,userpass]
      regions:
        dev1:
          endpoint: https://openstack.example.com:35574/v3.0/

To add cloud 'mystack', assuming the configuration file is mystack.yaml in the current directory, we would run:

juju add-cloud mystack mystack.yaml

Gathering credential information

The credential information is found on your private or public OpenStack account.

Adding credentials

The Credentials page offers a full treatment of credential management.

In order to access OpenStack, you will need to add credentials to Juju. This can be done in one of three ways.

Using the interactive method

Armed with the gathered information, you can add credentials with the command:

juju add-credential mystack

The command will interactively prompt you for the information needed for the chosen cloud. For the authentication type, either 'access-key', 'userpass', or 'access-key,userpass' (i.e. both are allowed) can be selected.

Alternately, you can use these credentials with Juju as a Service where you can deploy charms using a web GUI.

Using a file

A YAML-formatted file, say mycreds.yaml, can be used to store credential information for any cloud. This information is then added to Juju by pointing the add-credential command to the file:

juju add-credential myopenstack -f mycreds.yaml

See section Adding credentials from a file for guidance on what such a file looks like.

Using environment variables

With OpenStack you have the option of adding credentials using the following environment variables that may already be present (and set) on your client system:

OS_USERNAME
OS_PASSWORD
OS_TENANT_NAME
OS_DOMAIN_NAME

Add this credential information to Juju in this way:

juju autoload-credentials

For any found credentials you will be asked which ones to use and what name to store them under.

On Linux systems, the file $HOME/.novarc may be used to define these variables and is parsed by the above command as part of the scanning process.

For background information on this method read section Adding credentials from environment variables.

Images and private clouds

The above steps are all you need to use most OpenStack clouds which are configured for general use. If this is your own cloud, you will also need to additionally provide stream information so that the cloud can fetch the relevant images for Juju to use. This is covered in the section on Cloud cloud metadata.

Creating a controller

Once the image metadata has been gathered, either locally or via a registered and running Simplestream service, check your OpenStack networks. If there are multiple possible networks available to the cloud, it is also necessary to specify the network name or UUID for Juju to use to boot instances. Both the network name and UUID can be retrieved with the following command:

openstack network list

Choose the network you want the instances to boot from. You can use either the network name or the UUID with the 'network' configuration option when bootstrapping a new controller.

With the product-streams service running in your OpenStack Cloud, you are now ready to create a Juju controller:

juju bootstrap <cloud> <controller name> --config network=<network_id>

or if the simplestream data is local:

juju bootstrap <cloud> <controller name> --config network=<network_id> \
    --metadata-source ~/simplestreams/images

or if there is an external network configured for instances that are only accessible via floating IP:

juju bootstrap <cloud> <controller name> --config network=<network_id> \
    --config external-network=<external_network_id> --config use-floating-ip=true

For a detailed explanation and examples of the bootstrap command see the Creating a controller page.

Next steps

A controller is created with two models - the 'controller' model, which should be reserved for Juju's internal operations, and a model named 'default', which can be used for deploying user workloads.

See these pages for ideas on what to do next: