Introduction – orchestrating with OpenStack

OpenStack is chosen as a platform for many reasons, but one that frequently tops the list is orchestration. Without an element of orchestration in your OpenStack environment, you have a powerful turbo engine car that is just used for the school-run. As with any cloud environment, there are various tools to help with your orchestrated workloads, but out of the box, OpenStack provides Heat, the orchestration engine.

With Heat, you can define rich environments in a template, such as a multi-tier web application, which allows users consistency in launching these relatively complex deployments. I view the Heat orchestration templates (known as HOT (Heat Orchestration Template) – get it?) as a recipe that is written in YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). You define your ingredients that make up the environment. In a cooking recipe, this would be listing the amount of chocolate, flour, and sugar that is required for something like a cake. In a HOT ()file...