The placement API service was introduced in the 14.0.0 Newton release within the nova repository and extracted to the placement repository in the 19.0.0 Stein release. This is a REST API stack and data model used to track resource provider inventories and usages, along with different classes of resources. For example, a resource provider can be a compute node, a shared storage pool, or an IP allocation pool. The placement service tracks the inventory and usage of each provider. For example, an instance created on a compute node may be a consumer of resources such as RAM and CPU from a compute node resource provider, disk from an external shared storage pool resource provider and IP addresses from an external IP pool resource provider.
The types of resources consumed are tracked as classes. The service
provides a set of standard resource classes (for example DISK_GB
,
MEMORY_MB
, and VCPU
) and provides the ability to define custom
resource classes as needed.
Each resource provider may also have a set of traits which describe qualitative aspects of the resource provider. Traits describe an aspect of a resource provider that cannot itself be consumed but a workload may wish to specify. For example, available disk may be solid state drives (SSD).
For an overview of some of the features provided by placement, see Placement Usage.
For a command line reference, see Command-line Utilities.
See the Configuration Guide for information on configuring the system, including role-based access control policy rules.
See the Contributor Guide for information on how to contribute to the placement project and development processes and guidelines.
The following specifications represent the stages of design and development of resource providers and the Placement service. Implementation details may have changed or be partially complete at this time.
Note
Before the Stein release the placement code was in Nova alongside the compute REST API code (nova-api). Make sure that the release version of this document matches the release version you want to deploy.
1. Deploy the API service
Placement provides a placement-api
WSGI script for running the service with
Apache, nginx or other WSGI-capable web servers. Depending on what packaging
solution is used to deploy OpenStack, the WSGI script may be in /usr/bin
or /usr/local/bin
.
placement-api
, as a standard WSGI script, provides a module level
application
attribute that most WSGI servers expect to find. This means it
is possible to run it with lots of different servers, providing flexibility in
the face of different deployment scenarios. Common scenarios include:
In all of these scenarios the host, port and mounting path (or prefix) of the
application is controlled in the web server’s configuration, not in the
configuration (placement.conf
) of the placement application.
When placement was first added to DevStack it used the mod_wsgi
style.
Later it was updated to use mod_proxy_uwsgi. Looking at those changes can
be useful for understanding the relevant options.
DevStack is configured to host placement at /placement
on either the
default port for http or for https (80
or 443
) depending on whether TLS
is being used. Using a default port is desirable.
By default, the placement application will get its configuration for settings
such as the database connection URL from /etc/placement/placement.conf
.
The directory the configuration file will be found in can be changed by setting
OS_PLACEMENT_CONFIG_DIR
in the environment of the process that starts the
application. With recent releases of oslo.config
, configuration options may
also be set in the environment.
Note
When using uwsgi with a front end (e.g., apache2 or nginx) something needs to ensure that the uwsgi process is running. In DevStack this is done with systemd. This is one of many different ways to manage uwsgi.
This document refrains from declaring a set of installation instructions for the placement service. This is because a major point of having a WSGI application is to make the deployment as flexible as possible. Because the placement API service is itself stateless (all state is in the database), it is possible to deploy as many servers as desired behind a load balancing solution for robust and simple scaling. If you familiarize yourself with installing generic WSGI applications (using the links in the common scenarios list, above), those techniques will be applicable here.
2. Synchronize the database
The placement service uses its own database, defined in the
[placement_database]
section of configuration. The connection
option
must be set or the service will not start. The command line tool
placement-manage can be used to migrate the database tables to their
correct form, including creating them. The database described by the
connection
option must already exist.
In the Stein release, the placement code was extracted from nova. We have
scripts which can assist with migrating placement data from the nova-api
database to the placement database. You can find them in the placement
repository, /tools/mysql-migrate-db.sh
and
/tools/postgresql-migrate-db.sh
.
3. Create accounts and update the service catalog
Create a placement service user with an admin role in Keystone.
The placement API is a separate service and thus should be registered under a placement service type in the service catalog. Clients of placement, such as the resource tracker in the nova-compute node, will use the service catalog to find the placement endpoint.
Devstack sets up the placement service on the default HTTP port (80) with a
/placement
prefix instead of using an independent port.
The following sub-sections provide notes on upgrading to a given target release.
Note
As a reminder, the placement-status upgrade check tool can be used to help determine the status of your deployment and how ready it is to perform an upgrade.
For releases prior to Stein, please see the nova upgrade notes.
nova.conf
should be moved to a
separate placement configuration file placement.conf
.[placement]/policy_file
is changed
from placement-policy.yaml
to policy.yaml
/etc/placement
.The placement API service provides a REST API and data model. One can get a sample of the REST API via the functional test gabbits.
The placement API uses microversions for making incremental changes to the API which client requests must opt into.
It is especially important to keep in mind that nova-compute is a client of the placement REST API and based on how Nova supports rolling upgrades the nova-compute service could be Newton level code making requests to an Ocata placement API, and vice-versa, an Ocata compute service in a cells v2 cell could be making requests to a Newton placement API.
This history of placement microversions may be found in REST API Version History.
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