OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

The Ceph community lab has hundreds of machines continuously running integration and upgrade tests. OpenStack deeply transformed this infrastructure. It can now be setup with a one-liner by a new Ceph developer. And it can scale out when hundreds of machines are put to work before a release.

Ceph predates OpenStack and the lab was originally designed with bare metal machines and some custom libvirt scripts. Early 2015 the software using this infrastructure (teuthology) was improved with an OpenStack backend. The monolithic test cluster became a federation of OpenStack tenants. When a job is scheduled, it tries to create a few machines using one OpenStack tenant and fallback to another if that fails.

Prior to OpenStack, setting up a lab was a complex process and took days if not weeks of hard work. It can now be done by typing a one-liner and a developer can run a test outside of the Ceph community lab and teardown the resources as soon as it completes. The monolithic test cluster cease to be a dependency for each Ceph developer, which is a good thing for a Free Software community. It also has the nice side effect of reducing the load imposed on the Ceph community lab.