Heat - Orchestration

Debuting in the Havana release is the OpenStack Orchestration project Heat. Initial development for Heat was limited to a few OpenStack resources including compute, image, block storage, and network services. Heat has boosted the emergence of resource management in OpenStack by orchestrating different cloud resources resulting in the creation of stacks to run applications with a few pushes of a button. From simple template engine text files referred to as HOT templates (Heat Orchestration Template), users are able to provision the desired resources and run applications in no time. Heat is becoming an attractive OpenStack project due to its maturity and extended support resources catalog within the latest OpenStack releases. Other incubated OpenStack projects such as Sahara (Big Data as a Service) have been implemented to use the Heat engine to orchestrate the creation of the underlying resources stack. It is becoming a mature component in OpenStack and can be integrated with some system configuration management tools such as Chef for full stack automation and configuration setup.

Heat uses templates files in YAML or JSON format; indentation is important!

The Orchestration project in OpenStack is covered in more detail in Chapter 8, Operating the OpenStack Infrastructure- The User Perspective.