Development of template management technology for easy deployment of virtual resources on OpenStack

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the development of template management technology to build virtual resources environments on OpenStack. In recent days, Cloud computing has been progressed and also open source Cloud software has become widespread. Authors are developing cloud services using OpenStack. There are technologies which deploy a set of virtual resources based on system environmental templates to enable easy building, expansion or migration of cloud resources. OpenStack Heat and Amazon CloudFormation are template deployment technologies and build stacks which are sets of virtual resources based on templates. However, these existing technologies have 4 problems. Heat and CloudFormation transaction managements of stack create or update are insufficient. Heat and CloudFormation do not have sharing mechanism of templates. Heat cannot extract templates from existing virtual environments. Heat does not reflect actual environment changes to stack information. Therefore, we propose a new template management technology with 4 improvements. It has a mechanism of transaction management like roll back or roll forward in case of abnormal failure during stack operations. It shares templates among end users and System Integrators. It extracts templates from existing environments. It reflects actual environment changes to stack information. We implemented the proposed template management server and showed that end users can easily replicate or build virtual resources environments. Furthermore, we measured the performance of template extraction, stack create and update and showed our method could process templates in a sufficient short time.