Creating your first stack

With Heat, we can create a wide variety of templates from spinning up basic instances, to creating complete environments for an application. In this section, we will show the basics of Heat by spinning up an instance and attaching it to an existing Neutron network, and assigning a floating IP to it. Heat templates describe the resources being used, the type and size of the instances, the network an instance will be attached to, among other pieces of information required to run that environment.

In this section, we will show you how to use a HOT file to spin up two web servers running Apache, connected behind a third instance running HAProxy acting as the load balancer.

Getting ready

Ensure that you are logged onto a correctly configured OpenStack client and can access the OpenStack environment. Refer to Chapter 2, The OpenStack Client, for details of setting up your environment to use Heat.

How to do it...

In this section, we will download a HOT file called cookbook...