I work on OpenStack, I work in OpenStack. Seems like everyone I know that’s been working on, in, or with OpenStack has their own little script to “set up their environment” – meaning getting a VM spun up with their dotfiles, tools, etc, all configured and ready to roll. I had one myself for quite a while, and recently I threw it away.

CloudEnvy (https://github.com/cloudenvy/cloudenvy) is what started that cascade. Brian Waldon started it some time ago as a script that emulated the ease of spinning up VM’s with vagrant, except wrapped over the OpenStack clients. I always wanted to like Vagrant, but it never really synced for me. I think mostly because I was in never-ending kernel panic hell with virtualbox. CloudEnvy is a different story.

I think the most interesting illustration of CloudEnvy is using it to spin up an instance in a cloud, and then run devstack in that instance.

CloudEnvy relies on a starter of two files – one that’s specific to the project (DevStack in this case): Envyfile, and one for your personal cloud configuration (~/.cloudenvy).

Here’s my .cloudenvy file (with the hostname and password redacted):

And the Envyfile I use with devstack:

You’ll notice that the Envyfile references a script I named “cloudenvy-setup.sh” – this is the basic script that cloudenvy uploads to the instance it creates to automatically provision things up. You could easily replace this with Puppet, Chef, or whatever it is you like to configure VMs in your world.

Here’s what I’m doing:

(all three of these files are in the gist https://gist.github.com/3969250)

The Envyfile also refers to a image_name. I’m using a stock UEC precise image that I uploaded to our instance of OpenStack. Pretty shortly, CloudEnvy will be replacing “image_name” with just “image”, and they recommend that you use an image ID (guaranteed uniqueness) over a name. For my immediate use, the name works pretty well.

Once this is all in place:


envy up


Creates the instance, assigns it a floating IP address, SSH’s into the instance, uploads the provision script, and starts cranking on the provisioning. 763 seconds later, a fully operational devstack in an instance running on OpenStack.


envy ssh


Gets you in, lets you do what you want.


envy list


Shows you the instance(s) you have running.

There’s more, a lot more, but hopefully this is sufficient to get you started.

This fall’s OpenStack design summit in San Diego is wrapped up, and we’re all back to being distributed across the globe. I was pleased with the summit, and pleased to see the project I’m helping coordinate (Keystone) move forward with a lot of ideas, growing interest in contributions, and concrete feedback from a wide mix of folks.

The design sessions are definitely less about actually hacking code than they were a year ago, offset though with the increasing diversity of backgrounds and interests participating in the sessions. The core team developers joined me through-out Thursday and drove most of the discussions, with fantastic input from David Chadwick, Khaja, Ryan Lane. There were way more people in the sessions than that, but to me these three represent a set of fresh inputs from folks with a deep academic background, previous experience building identity systems, and active operator points of view. They and the the previous contributors provided tremendous feedback, asked great questions, and set the stage for a lot of interesting ideas.

This year all the project technical leads gave a “state of the project” overview, but we did that on Tuesday – so like John Griffith (the project technical lead for cinder), I was doing the ‘state of the project’ routine prior to getting the feedback and doing the brainstorming in the sessions. The slides from that presentation are online at http://www.slideshare.net/ccjoe/oct-2012-state-of-project-keystone if you’re interested. The coordinators all video-taped those segments, as I understand it, they should be appearing on the OpenStack channel in Youtube in the next couple of days.

There was also a very active session led by Gabriel Hurley seeking to drive more continuity into the OpenStack APIs, and a matching session by Doug Hellman and Dean Troyer for the OpenStack CLIs. The continued focus on bringing in new ideas while keeping the interfaces consistent and clear is a great sign for the project overall, and I was pleased to see a large number of like minded folks wanting to continue to move things forward in those areas.

This was also the first summit under the auspices of the OpenStack Foundation – they all met for an extended period of time early in the conference, and the Technical Committee managed to pull of a first all-in-person meeting over dinner and scattered conversation Tuesday evening.

And not at all related to any core projects or overall effort: check out the very creative riff on the OpenStack theme Dope’n'Stack, (video on YouTube as well). Gabriel and Erik were working their tails off prior to and during the conference to pull this off, culminating in a great presentation Wednesday evening at Piston’s party. (I was disappointed that Gabriel lost the mohawk for the summit, but he said he was sick of wearing it after three weeks).