Introduction

shade is a simple client library for interacting with OpenStack clouds. The key word here is simple. Clouds can do many many many things - but there are probably only about 10 of them that most people care about with any regularity. If you want to do complicated things, you should probably use the lower level client libraries - or even the REST API directly. However, if what you want is to be able to write an application that talks to clouds no matter what crazy choices the deployer has made in an attempt to be more hipster than their self-entitled narcissist peers, then shade is for you.

shade started its life as some code inside of ansible. ansible has a bunch of different OpenStack related modules, and there was a ton of duplicated code. Eventually, between refactoring that duplication into an internal library, and adding logic and features that the OpenStack Infra team had developed to run client applications at scale, it turned out that we'd written nine-tenths of what we'd need to have a standalone library.

Example

Sometimes an example is nice.

1. Create a clouds.yml file:

   clouds:
    mordred:
      region_name: RegionOne
      auth:
        username: 'mordred'
        password: XXXXXXX
        project_name: 'shade'
        auth_url: 'https://montytaylor-sjc.openstack.blueboxgrid.com:5001/v2.0'

   Please note: os-client-config will look for a file called clouds.yaml in the following locations:

   • Current Directory
   • ~/.config/openstack
   • /etc/openstack

   More information at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/os-client-config

2. Create a server with shade, configured with the clouds.yml file:

   import shade
   
   # Initialize and turn on debug logging
   shade.simple_logging(debug=True)
   
   # Initialize cloud
   # Cloud configs are read with os-client-config
   cloud = shade.openstack_cloud(cloud='mordred')
   
   # Upload an image to the cloud
   image = cloud.create_image(
       'ubuntu-trusty', filename='ubuntu-trusty.qcow2', wait=True)
   
   # Find a flavor with at least 512M of RAM
   flavor = cloud.get_flavor_by_ram(512)
   
   # Boot a server, wait for it to boot, and then do whatever is needed
   # to get a public ip for it.
   cloud.create_server(
       'my-server', image=image, flavor=flavor, wait=True, auto_ip=True)