HOT (or HEAT Orchestration Template) Generator, is an intuitive and easy-to-use graphical tool that can be used to quickly generate and automatically deploy HEAT Orchestration templates on the OpenStack cloud.
OpenStack HEAT is an orchestrations tool that provides an abstraction over other basic components of OpenStack such as Nova, Neutron and Glance. HEAT is an important component of OpenStack as it primarily manages infrastructure. HEAT implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated as code. These are standard templates to define infrastructure resources in OpenStack.
In order to define these infrastructure resources, an understanding of the specifics of HEAT templates (such as syntax, variable names, connectivity etc.) is required.
HOT Generator is a graphical tool that provides an interface to easily define, manage and deploy these templates.
Benefits
HOT Generator provides an abstraction layer to define HEAT Orchestration Templates. The main features of the tool include:
- User Friendly Graphical User interface
- Integration with OpenStack Horizon
- Automatic generation of HEAT Orchestration Templates
- Automatic deployment of HEAT Orchestration Templates in OpenStack
Current features
Users can create scenarios consisting of HEAT resources on a graphical user interface provided by HOT Generator. The interface generates HEAT Orchestration Templates based on the scenario. These templates can consist of many resource group types such as Nova server, Neutron network and Glance image etc. Currently, the tool works with Nova server and Neutron Network for VM and network creation, along with their inter-connectivity.
Future upgrades
The current release of HOT Generator is designed to be scalable and in the future releases, we plan to provide support for all resource group types to manage more complex infrastructures.
- More resource group types
- More configuration options and attributes in GUI
- Compatibility with future OpenStack releases
- Compatibility with more distributions of OpenStack