Airship is a collection of interoperable and loosely coupled open source tools that provide for automated cloud provisioning and life cycle management in a completely declarative and predictable way. The focus of this project is the implementation of a declarative platform to introduce OpenStack on Kubernetes, and the lifecycle management of the resulting cloud. Airship achieves this by managing the lifecycle of the entire stack, from the baremetal infrastructure and network configuration, to the Docker configuration and Kubernetes cluster, as well as OpenStack. It does this with the scale, speed, resiliency, flexibility and operational predictability demanded of Network Clouds at scale.
This presentation provides an overview of the Airship project and its recent transition to the OpenStack foundation. You can expect to learn what services and components make up the Airship project as well as how they work together to provide declarative and predictable lifecycle management for your cloud and the advantages this brings for operators. We will review how this is leveraged today by several companies and how you can get started using and contributing to the project.
At its core, the Airship project has four main objectives:
BE DECLARATIVE
Sites are declared using YAML. This includes both hard assets such as network configuration and bare metal hosts as well as soft assets like helm charts, their overrides, and container images. You manage the document and Airship implements it.
ONE WORKFLOW FOR LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT
We needed a system that was predictable with life cycle management at its core. This meant ensuring we had one workflow that handled both initial deployments as well as future site updates. In other words, there should be virtually nothing different when interacting with a new deployment or providing an an update to an existing site.
CONTAINERS AS THE NEW UNIT OF SOFTWARE DELIVERY
Containers are the unit of software delivery for Airship. Everything is a container. This allows us to predictably promote hermetically sealed containers from development, to testing, and finally production with confidence.
FLEXIBLE FOR DIFFERENT ARCHITECTURES AND SOFTWARE
Airship is delivering environments both very small and large with a wide range of configurations. We use Airship to manage our entire cloud platform, not just OpenStack.
