The OpenStackManager extension is a web interface for OpenStack, and a manager for a fully integrated test and development network being written primarily for Wikimedia Foundation use.

This is a features and bugfix release of the OpenStackManager extension. The following has changed:

• Added floating ip output to instance list
• Removed cast calls from code pulling info from classes, and added them to the output of the classes (code cleanup)
• Added support for cloud-init via $wgOpenStackManagerInstanceUserData
  • Can currently add cloudconfig, scripts, and upstarts
  • cloudconfig is currently an array that is converted to YAML, whereas scripts and upstarts load from given files

For the past month or so I’ve been working on an extension to manage OpenStack (Nova), for use on the Wikimedia Foundation’s upcoming virtualization cluster. I’ve gotten to a point where I believe the extension is ready for an initial release.

In brief, OpenStack works a lot like EC2, and in fact implements the EC2 API. This extension interacts with the EC2 API and LDAP, to manage a virtual machine infrastructure. It has the following features:

• Integrates with the LdapAuthentication extension, and creates user accounts in LDAP upon user creation
  • Users created with a posix username, uid, and gid; home directory; OpenStack credentials; and wiki credentials

It’s been a while since I’ve written a technical post, so I thought, maybe I should write about what I’ve been working on for the past couple months…

I’ve been building a test and development infrastructure for The Wikimedia Foundation using OpenStack, and a number of other technologies. I’m not done yet, so I won’t get into any gory technical details (I promise I will later!). I will, however, give an overview of the architecture I’m aiming for.

Basic overview

We want a test and development infrastructure for a number of reasons: