Information System

Information discovery provides a real-time view about the actual images and flavors available at the OpenStack for the federation users. It runs as a single python application cloud-info-provider that pushes information through the Messaging Service.

You can either run the service by yourself or rely on central operations of the cloud-info-provider. In both cases you must register your host DN in the GOCDB entry for the org.openstack.nova.

Catch-all operations

EGI can manage the operation of the cloud-info-provider for the site so you don’t need to do it. In order for your site to be included in the centrally operated cloud-info-provider, you need to create a Pull Request at the EGI-Federation/fedcloud-catchall-operations repository adding your site configuration in the sites directory with a file like this:

endpoint: <your endpoint as declared in GOCDB>
gocdb: <your site name as declared in GOCDB>
vos:
  # a list of VOs you support in your deployment as follows
  - auth:
      project_id: <local OpenStack project identifier>
    name: <name of the vo>
  - auth:
      project_id: <local OpenStack project identifier for second VO>
    name: <name of another vo>

Once PR is merged, the service will be reconfigured and your site should start publishing information.

Local operations

You can operate by yourself the cloud-info-provider. The software can be obtained as RPMs, debs and python packages from the GitHub releases page.

The cloud-info-provider needs a configuration file where your site is described, see the sample OpenStack configuration for the required information. The authentication parameters for your local OpenStack and the AMS are passed as command-line options:

cloud-info-provider-service --yaml-file <your site description.yaml> \
                            --middleware openstack \
                            --os-auth-url <your keystone URL> \
                            [ any other options for authentication ]
                            --format glue21 \
                            --publisher ams \
                            --ams-cert <your host certificate> \
                            --ams-key <your host secret key> \
                            --ams-topic <your endpoint topic>

For authentication, you should be able to use any authentication method supported by keystoneauth, for username and password use: --os-password and --os-username. Check the complete list of options with cloud-info-provider-service --help.

The AMS topic has the format: SITE_<SITE_NAME>_ENDPOINT_<GOCDB_ID>, where <SITE_NAME> is the name of the site as declared in GOCDB and <GOCDB_ID> is the ID of the endpoint in GOCDB. For example, this endpoint would have a topic like: SITE_IFCA-LCG2_ENDPOINT_7513G0.

You should periodically run the cloud-info-provider (e.g. with a cron every 5 minutes) to push the information for consumption by clients.

Using the EGI FedCloud Appliance

The appliance provides a ready-to-use cloud-info-provider configuration if you want to operate it by yourself. Once you have downloaded the appliance check the following files:

• /etc/cloud-info-provider/openstack.rc: the configuration of the account used to log into your OpenStack and the location of the host certificate that will be used to authenticate to the AMS.

• /etc/cloud-info-provider/openstack.yaml: the cloud-info-provider configuration. You need to enter the details about the VOs/projects that the site is supporting.

The appliance has a cron job that will connect to the configured OpenStack API and send messages every 5 minutes.