Brad Dickinson | Writing Your First OpenStack Application

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Ever thought about what it takes to write a scalable cloud application using an OpenStack SDK? Thanks to a small team’s heroic effort, there’s now a guide for that!

Christian Berendt (B1 Systems), Sean Collins (Mirantis), James Dempsey (Catalyst IT) and Tom Fifield gathered in Taipei, with Nick Chase live via video link, to produce “Writing Your First OpenStack Application” in just five days. The sprint was organised by the Application Ecosystem Working Group, with the financial support of the OpenStack Foundation.

The new work is aimed at software developers who want to build applications on OpenStack clouds and also shares some best practices for cloud application development.

Inspired by Django’s first app tutorial, where a simple polling app is used to explore the basics of working with Django, “Writing Your First OpenStack Application” uses an app that generates beautiful fractal images as a teaching tool to run through areas like:

Creating and destroying compute resources.
Scaling available resources up and down.
Using Object and Block storage for file and database persistence.
Customizing networking for better performance and segregation.
Making cloud-related architecture decisions such as turning functions into micro-services and modularizing them.

The guide has been written with a strong preference for the most common API calls, so it will work across a broad spectrum of OpenStack versions. In addition, the authors have paid special attention that the first few sections should work almost regardless of OpenStack cloud configuration.

A core part of the guide’s design is support for multiple SDKs. The initial version was written and tested with the libcloud SDK, but work is underway for python-openstacksdk, pkgcloud and fog which will re-use the text with new code samples.

So, check out “Writing your First OpenStack Application” for libcloud, watch the introductory presentation from the summit, or consider helping complete the samples for other languages.