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Installing applications in OpenStack with Murano

Ready-Made

Article from ADMIN 30/2015

By Udo Seidel

Murano provides an interface for installing and managing applications in the OpenStack cloud.

Several projects now exist under the patronage of OpenStack or the OpenStack Foundation. What started out as quite a small project in 2010 with Nova and Swift has become an extensive collection of various as-a-service modules. Like OpenStack itself, requirements and expectations of OpenStack's users have also grown.

From a data center perspective, it might be sufficient to be able to provision servers, networks, and storage quickly and elegantly. Although it is possible for cloud providers to earn money this way, for most others, the infrastructure is only the beginning. Applications need to run on an OpenStack machine with a configuration appropriate to their actual business needs. Infrastructure alone is not enough. In contrast, the typical case is two-or three-tier applications with dependencies between the individual components and often additional requirements for the associated network.

Complete Collection

Suppose someone is looking for new clothes. That person might need a shirt, vest, jacket, and pants. In this analogy, OpenStack would be equivalent to a shopping mall. Buyers visit individual shops and choose what they want. In doing so, they need to make sure that the items match. Would it not be much easier to choose a pre-assembled outfit from a catalog?

The OpenStack Murano [1] project is a catalog of sorts – but for applications. Roughly speaking, the project provides interfaces for installing and managing a complete application environment in an OpenStack cloud. Murano does not exactly reinvent the wheel; instead, it draws on existing projects.

Heat and Mistral, for example, are used for orchestration and work processes. Murano sees itself as an integrator that merges the existing pieces of the puzzle into one image. Figure 1 shows an abstract view of

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