tripleo-specs/specs/ocata/tripleo-composable-upgrades.rst

Composable Service Upgrades

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/tripleo/+spec/overcloud-upgrades-per-service

In the Newton release TripleO delivered a new capability to deploy arbitrary custom roles (groups of nodes) with a lot of flexibility of which services are placed on which roles (using roles_data.yaml). This means we can no longer make the same assumptions about a specific service running on a particular role (e.g Controller).

The current upgrades workflow is organised around the node role determining the order in which that given node and services deployed therein are upgraded. The workflow dictates "swifts", before "controllers", before "cinders", before "computes", before "cephs". The reasons for this ordering are beyond the scope here and ultimately inconsequential, since the important point to note is there is a hard coded relationship between a given service and a given node with respect to upgrading that service (e.g. a script that upgrades all services on "Compute" nodes). For upgrades from Newton to Ocata we can no longer make these assumptions about services being tied to a specific role, so a more composable model is needed.

Consensus after the initial discussion during the Ocata design summit session was that:

• Re-engineering the upgrades workflow for Newton to Ocata is necessary because 'custom roles'
• We should start by moving the upgrades logic into the composable service templates in the tripleo-heat-templates (i.e. into each service)
• There is still a need for an over-arching workflow - albeit service rather than role oriented.
• It is TBD what will drive that workflow. We will use whatever will be 'easier' for a first iteration, especially given the Ocata development time contraints.

Problem Description

As explained in the introduction above, the current upgrades workflow can no longer work for composable service deployments. Right now the upgrade scripts are organised around and indeed targetted at specific nodes: the upgrade script for swifts is different to that for computes or for controllers (split across a number of steps) cinders or cephs. These scripts are invoked as part of a worfklow where each step is either a heat stack update or invocation of the upgrade-non-controller.sh script to execute the node specific upgrade script (delivered as one of the earlier steps in the workflow) on non controllers.

One way to handle this problem is to decompose the upgrades logic from those monolithic per-node upgrade scripts into per-service upgrades logic. This should live in the tripleo-heat-templates puppet services templates for each service. For the upgrade of a give service we need to express:

• any pre-upgrade requirements (run a migration, stop a service, pin RPC)
• any post upgrade (migrations, service starts/reload config)
• any dependencies on other services (upgrade foo only after bar)

If we organise the upgrade logic in this manner the idea is to gain the flexibility to combine this dynamically into the new upgrades workflow. Besides the per-service upgrades logic the worklow will also need to handle and provide for any deployment wide upgrades related operations such as unpin of the RPC version once all services are successfully running Ocata, or upgrading of services that aren't directly managed or configured by the tripleo deployment (like openvswitch as just one example), or even the delivery of a new kernel which will require a reboot on the given service node after all services have been upgraded.

Proposed Change

The first step is to work out where to add upgrades related configuration to each service in the tripleo-heat-templates services templates. The exact format will depend on what we end up using to drive the workflow. We could include them in the outputs as 'upgrade_config', like:

outputs:
  role_data:
    description: Role data for the Nova Compute service.
    value:
      service_name: nova_compute
      ...
    upgrade_tasks:
        - name: RPC pin nova-compute
          exec: "crudini --set /etc/nova/nova.conf upgrade_levels compute $upgrade_level_nova_compute"
          tags: step1
        - name: stop nova-compute
          service: name=openstack-nova-compute state=stopped
          tags: step2
        - name: update heat database
          command: nova-manage db_sync
          tags: step3
        - name: start nova-compute
          service: name=openstack-nova-compute state=started
          tags: step4
        ...

The current proposal is for the upgrade snippets to be expressed in Ansible. The initial focus will be to drive the upgrade via the existing tripleo tooling, e.g heat applying ansible similar to how heat applies scripts for the non composable implementation. In future it may also be possible to expose the per-role ansible playbooks to enable advanced operators to drive the upgrade workflow directly, perhaps used in conjunction with the dynamic inventory provided for tripleo validations.

One other point of note that was brought up in the Ocata design summit session and which should factor into the design here is that operators may wish to run the upgrade in stages rather than all at once. It could still be the case that the new workflow can differentiate between 'controlplane' vs 'non-controlplane' services. The operator could then upgrade controlplane services as one stand-alone upgrade step and then later start to roll out the upgrade of non-controlplane services.

Alternatives

One alternative is to have a stand-alone upgrades workflow driven by ansible. Some early work and prototyping was done as well as a (linked from the Ocata design summit session). Ultimately the proposal was abandoned but it is still possible that we will use ansible for the upgrade logic as described above. We could also explore exposing the resulting ansible playbooks for advanced operators to invoke as part of their own tooling.

Other End User Impact

Significant change in the tripleo upgrades workflow.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee: shardy

Other contributors: marios, emacchi, matbu, chem, lbezdick,

Work Items

Some prototyping by shardy at "WIP prototyping composable upgrades with Heat+Ansible" at I39f5426cb9da0b40bec4a7a3a4a353f69319bdf9

• Decompose the upgrades logic into each service template in the tht
• Design a workflow that incorporates migrations, the per-service upgrade scripts and any deployment wide upgrades operations.
• Decide how this workflow is to be invoked (mistral? puppet? bash?)
• profit!

Dependencies

Testing

Hopefully we can use the soon to be added upgrades job to help with the development and testing of this feature and obviously guard against changes that break upgrades. Ideally we will expand that to include jobs for each of the stable branches (upgrade M->N and N->O). The M->N would exercise the previous upgrades workflow whereas N->O would be exercising the work developed as part of this spec.

Documentation Impact

References