Overview

Senlin is a clustering service for OpenStack clouds. It creates and operates clusters of homogeneous objects exposed by other OpenStack services. The goal is to make orchestration of collections of similar objects easier.

Senlin interacts with other OpenStack services so that clusters of resources exposed by those services can be created and operated. These interactions are mostly done through the via profile plugins. Each profile type implementation enable Senlin to create, update, delete a specific type of resources.

A Cluster can be associated with different Policy objects that can be checked/enforced at varying enforcement levels. Through service APIs, a user can dynamically add Node to and remove node from a cluster, attach and detach policies, such as creation policy, deletion policy, load-balancing policy, scaling policy, health policy etc. Through integration with other OpenStack projects, users will be enabled to manage deployments and orchestrations large-scale resource pools much easier.

Senlin is designed to be capable of managing different types of objects. An object’s lifecycle is managed using Profile Type implementations, which are plugins that can be dynamically loaded by the service engine.

Components

The developers are focusing on creating an OpenStack style project using OpenStack design tenets, implemented in Python. We have started with a close interaction with Heat project.

senlinclient

The senlinclient package provides a plugin for the openstackclient tool so you have a command line interface to communicate with the senlin-api to manage clusters, nodes, profiles, policies, actions and events. End developers could also use the Senlin REST API directly.

senlin-dashboard

The senlin-dashboard is a Horizon plugin that provides a UI for senlin.

senlin-api

The senlin-api component provides an OpenStack-native REST API that processes API requests by sending them to the senlin-engine over RPC.

senlin-engine

The senlin-engine’s main responsibility is to create and orchestrate the clusters, nodes, profiles and policies.

Installation

You will need to make sure you have a suitable environment for deploying Senlin. Please refer to Installation for detailed instructions on setting up an environment to use the Senlin service.