xOpera orchestration tool compliant with TOSCA YAML v1.3 in the making.

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Installation and Quickstart
• Common examples
  • OpenStack client setup
• Connected resources
• Acknowledgement

opera aims to be a lightweight orchestrator compliant with OASIS TOSCA. The current compliance is with the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML v1.3. The documentation for the tool is available on GitHub pages. Opera implements TOSCA standard with Ansible automation tool where Ansible playbooks can be used as orchestration actuators.

opera requires python 3 and a virtual environment. In a typical modern Linux environment, we should already be set. In Ubuntu, however, we might need to run the following commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -y python3-venv python3-wheel python-wheel-common

The orchestration tool is available on PyPI as a package named opera. Apart from the latest production version, you can also find the latest opera develop version (available on Test PyPI instance), which includes pre-releases so that you will be able to test the latest features before they are officially released.

The simplest way to test opera is to install it into virtual environment:

$ mkdir ~/opera && cd ~/opera
$ python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ pip install opera

To test if everything is working as expected, we can now clone xOpera's GitHub repository and try to deploy a hello-world service:

(.venv) $ git clone [email protected]:xlab-si/xopera-opera.git
(.venv) $ cd xopera-opera/examples/hello
(.venv) $ opera deploy service.yaml

If nothing went wrong, new empty file has been created at /tmp/playing-opera/hello/hello.txt.

To delete the created directory, we can undeploy our stuff by running:

(.venv) $ opera undeploy

And that is it.

This part focuses on different common ways of usage for opera orchestration tool.

Because using OpenStack modules from Ansible playbooks is quite common, we can install opera with all required OpenStack libraries by running:

(.venv) $ pip install -U opera[openstack]

Before we can actually use the OpenStack functionality, we also need to obtain the OpenStack credentials. If we log into OpenStack and navigate to the Access & Security -> API Access page, we can download the rc file with all required information.

At the start of each session (e.g., when we open a new command line console), we must source the rc file by running:

(venv) $ . openstack.rc

After we enter the password, we are ready to start using the OpenStack modules in playbooks that implement life cycle operations.

The table below show other important resources that are connected to opera.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreements No. 825040 (RADON) and No. 825480 (SODALITE).