Developing Murano Packages 101

Murano provides a very powerful and flexible platform to automate the provisioning, deployment, configuration and lifecycle management of applications in OpenStack clouds. However, the flexibility comes at cost: to manage an application with Murano one has to design and develop special scenarios which will tell Murano how to handle different aspects of application lifecycle. These scenarios are usually called “Murano Applications” or “Murano Packages”. It is not hard to build them, but it requires some time to get familiar with Murano’s DSL to define these scenarios and to learn the common patterns and best practices. This article provides a basic introductory course of these aspects and aims to be the starting point for the developers willing to learn how to develop Murano Application packages with ease.

The course consists of the following parts:

• Part 1: Creating your first Application Package
  • Creating package manifest
  • Adding a class
  • Pack and upload your app
  • Deploying your application
• Part 2: Customizing your Application Package
  • Adding user input
  • Adding user interface
  • Simplifying code: namespaces
  • Adding more info for the catalog
• Part 3: Creating a Plone CMS application package
  • The goal
  • Preparation
  • Library classes
  • Provisioning a VM
  • Running a command on the VM
  • Loading a script from a resource file
  • Configuring OpenStack Security
  • Notifying end-user on Plone location
  • Completing the Plone class
  • Providing a UI definition
  • Deploying the package
• Part 4: Refactoring code to use the Application Framework
  • Step 1: Add dependency on the App Framework
  • Step 2: Get rid of the instance
  • Step 3: Change the base classes
  • Step 4: Split the deployment logic
  • Step 5: Configuring OpenStack security group
  • Step 6: Provide the server group instance
  • Step 6: Using server group composition

Before you proceed, please ensure that you have an OpenStack cloud (devstack-based will work just fine) and the latest version of Murano deployed. This guide assumes that the reader has a basic knowledge of some programming languages and object-oriented design and is a bit familiar with the scripting languages used to configure Linux servers. Also it would be beneficial to be familiar with YAML format: lots of software configuration tools nowadays use YAML, and Murano is no different.