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How Fuel Works
Fuel is a ready-to-install collection of the packages and scripts you need to create a robust, configurable, vendor-independent OpenStack cloud in your own environment. As of Fuel 3.1, Fuel Library and Fuel Web have been merged into a single toolbox with options to use the UI or CLI for management.
A single OpenStack cloud consists of packages from many different open source projects, each with its own requirements, installation procedures, and configuration management. Fuel brings all of these projects together into a single open source distribution, with components that have been tested and are guaranteed to work together, and all wrapped up using scripts to help you work through a single installation.
Simply put, Fuel is a way for you to easily configure and install an OpenStack-based infrastructure in your own environment.
Fuel works on a simple premise. Rather than installing each of the components that make up OpenStack directly, you instead use a configuration management system like Puppet to create scripts that can provide a configurable, reproducible, sharable installation process.
In practice, Fuel works as follows:
- First, set up Fuel Master Node using the ISO. This process only needs to be completed once per installation.
- Next, discover your virtual or physical nodes and configure your OpenStack cluster using the Fuel UI.
- Finally, deploy your OpenStack cluster on discovered nodes. Fuel will perform all deployment magic for you by applying pre-configured and pre-integrated Puppet manifests via Astute orchestration engine.
Fuel is designed to enable you to maintain your cluster while giving you the flexibility to adapt it to your own configuration.
Fuel comes with several pre-defined deployment configurations, some of them include additional configuration options that allow you to adapt OpenStack deployment to your environment.
Fuel UI integrates all of the deployments scripts into a unified, Web-based Graphical User Interface that walks administrators through the process of installing and configuring a fully functional OpenStack environment.