Prerequisites for the test environment

The OpenStack test environment will involve the setup of the deployment machine, the Ansible deployment server, and the target hosts, which are the different OpenStack nodes that Ansible will run its playbooks against.

To speed up a simple installation approach, in this section, we will use a very promising OpenStack project named OpenStack-Ansible (OSA). Rackspace Private Cloud Software has initiated this project and has been officially integrated with the support of the OpenStack community. It aims to deploy an OpenStack private cloud by the means of Ansible Playbooks. OSA was released to run an OpenStack environment for production-ready deployment.

In addition, the OSA project could run in All-In-One (AIO) mode. It takes advantage of Linux containerization technology, Linux Container (LXC), so different infrastructures and OpenStack services will run isolated in different containers, but on the same machine.

Conceptually, this approach would somewhat resolve the trade-off of the time consumed for code testing, in our case playbooks, and the delivery speed of the complete suite and consistent OpenStack environment.