Kolla Overview

The Kolla project is a member of the OpenStack Governance.

Kolla's mission statement is:

To provide tools to create production-ready containers and
to provide deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds.

Kolla provides tools to create containers that can be run under either Docker or Podman <https://podman.io/>, as well as Ansible playbooks to deploy OpenStack on baremetal or virtual machine to meet Kolla's mission.

Kolla has out of the box defaults for a working basic deployment, and also implements complete customization. This model permits operators with minimal experience to deploy OpenStack quickly and as the operator's experience grows modify the OpenStack configuration to suit the operator's exact requirements.

Getting Started

Learn about Kolla by reading the documentation online Kolla.

Get started by reading the Kolla Ansible Developer Quickstart.

The Kolla Repository

The Kolla repository is one of four deliverables of the OpenStack Kolla project. The four deliverables that make up the Kolla project are:

Deliverable	Repository
kolla	https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla
kolla-ansible	https://opendev.org/openstack/kolla-ansible
ansible-collection-kolla	https://opendev.org/openstack/ansible-collection-kolla
kayobe	https://opendev.org/openstack/kayobe

The Kolla developers publish images in the Quay.io openstack.kolla namespace for every tagged release. You can view the available images on Quay.io.

Warning

Kolla(-ansible) defaults to using these images in order to ease testing and demonstration setups, but they are not intended to be used beyond this. In particular, they do not undergo any security scrutiny. If you intend to deploy Kolla for production purposes, you are advised to create and curate your own set of images using the kolla tool.

OpenStack services

Kolla provides images to deploy the following OpenStack projects:

• Aodh
• Barbican
• Bifrost
• Blazar
• Ceilometer
• Cinder
• CloudKitty
• Cyborg
• Designate
• Glance
• Heat
• Horizon
• Ironic
• Keystone
• Kuryr
• Magnum
• Manila
• Masakari
• Mistral
• Neutron
• Nova
• Octavia
• Placement
• Skyline (APIServer and Console)
• Tacker
• Trove
• Watcher
• Zun

Infrastructure components

Kolla provides images to deploy the following infrastructure components:

• Collectd, Grafana for performance monitoring.
• Cron for log rotation.
• Etcd a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines.
• Fluentd as an open source data collector for unified logging layer.
• Gnocchi a time-series storage database.
• Corosync and Pacemaker for HAcluster.
• HAProxy and Keepalived for high availability of services and their endpoints.
• MariaDB and Galera Cluster for highly available MySQL databases.
• Memcached a distributed memory object caching system.
• MariaDB Backup A tool which provides a method of performing a hot backup of your MySQL data while the system is running.
• Open vSwitch for use with Neutron.
• Opensearch to search, analyze, and visualize log messages.
• Prometheus an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud.
• RabbitMQ as a broker messaging back end for communication between services.
• Valkey Sentinel provides high availability for valkey along with collateral tasks such as monitoring, notification and acts as configuration provider for clients.
• Telegraf as a plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics.

Directories

• contrib - Contains sample template override files.
• doc - Contains documentation.
• docker - Contains jinja2 templates for the Docker build system.
• etc - Contains a reference etc directory structure which requires configuration of a small number of configuration variables to build docker images.
• kolla - Contains Python modules for kolla image build system.
• releasenotes - Contains the releasenote for all added features in kolla.
• roles - Contains Ansible roles used in CI.
• specs - Contains the Kolla communities key arguments about architectural shifts in the code base.
• tests - Contains functional testing tools.
• tools - Contains tools for interacting with the kolla repository.

Getting Involved

Need a feature? Find a bug? Let us know! Contributions are much appreciated and should follow the standard Gerrit workflow.

• We communicate using the #openstack-kolla irc channel.
• File bugs, blueprints, track releases, etc on Launchpad.
• Attend weekly meetings.
• Contribute code.

Notices

Docker and the Docker logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Docker, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Docker, Inc. and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein.