openstacksdk is a client library for building applications to work with OpenStack clouds. The project aims to provide a consistent and complete set of interactions with OpenStack's many services, along with complete documentation, examples, and tools.
It also contains an abstraction interface layer. Clouds can do many things, but there are probably only about 10 of them that most people care about with any regularity. If you want to do complicated things, the per-service oriented portions of the SDK are for you. However, if what you want is to be able to write an application that talks to any OpenStack cloud regardless of configuration, then the Cloud Abstraction layer is for you.
More information about the history of openstacksdk can be found at https://docs.openstack.org/openstacksdk/latest/contributor/history.html
Authentication and connection management
openstacksdk aims to talk to any OpenStack cloud. To do this, it requires a
configuration file. openstacksdk favours clouds.yaml files, but can also
use environment variables. The clouds.yaml file should be provided by your
cloud provider or deployment tooling. An example:
clouds:
mordred:
region_name: Dallas
auth:
username: 'mordred'
password: XXXXXXX
project_name: 'demo'
auth_url: 'https://identity.example.com'openstacksdk will look for clouds.yaml files in the following locations:
- If set, the path indicated by the
OS_CLIENT_CONFIG_FILEenvironment variable .(the current directory)$HOME/.config/openstack/etc/openstack
You can create a connection using the openstack.connect function. The cloud
name can be either passed directly to this function or specified using the
OS_CLOUD environment variable. If you don't have a clouds.yaml file and
instead use environment variables for configuration then you can use the
special envvars cloud name to load configuration from the environment. For
example:
import openstack
# Initialize connection from a clouds.yaml by passing a cloud name
conn_from_cloud_name = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# Initialize connection from a clouds.yaml using the OS_CLOUD envvar
conn_from_os_cloud = openstack.connect()
# Initialize connection from environment variables
conn_from_env_vars = openstack.connect(cloud='envvars')Note
How this is all achieved is described in more detail below.
The cloud layer
openstacksdk consists of four layers which all build on top of each other. The
highest level layer is the cloud layer. Cloud layer methods are available via
the top level Connection object returned by openstack.connect. For
example:
import openstack
# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)
# Initialize connection
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# List the servers
for server in conn.list_servers():
print(server.to_dict())The cloud layer is based on logical operations that can potentially touch multiple services. The benefit of this layer is mostly seen in more complicated operations that take multiple steps and where the steps vary across providers. For example:
import openstack
# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)
# Initialize connection
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# Upload an image to the cloud
image = conn.create_image(
'ubuntu-trusty', filename='ubuntu-trusty.qcow2', wait=True)
# Find a flavor with at least 512M of RAM
flavor = conn.get_flavor_by_ram(512)
# Boot a server, wait for it to boot, and then do whatever is needed
# to get a public IP address for it.
conn.create_server(
'my-server', image=image, flavor=flavor, wait=True, auto_ip=True)The proxy layer
The next layer is the proxy layer. Most users will make use of this layer.
The proxy layer is service-specific, so methods will be available under
service-specific connection attributes of the Connection object such as
compute, block_storage, image etc. For example:
import openstack
# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)
# Initialize connection
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# List the servers
for server in conn.compute.servers():
print(server.to_dict())Note
A list of supported services is given below.
The resource layer
Below this there is the resource layer. This provides support for the basic
CRUD operations supported by REST APIs and is the base building block for the
other layers. You typically will not need to use this directly but it can be
helpful for operations where you already have a Resource object to hand.
For example:
import openstack
import openstack.config.loader
import openstack.compute.v2.server
# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)
# Initialize connection
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# List the servers
for server in openstack.compute.v2.server.Server.list(session=conn.compute):
print(server.to_dict())The raw HTTP layer
Finally, there is the raw HTTP layer. This exposes raw HTTP semantics and
is effectively a wrapper around the requests API with added smarts to
handle stuff like authentication and version management. As such, you can use
the requests API methods you know and love, like get, post and
put, and expect to receive a requests.Response object in response
(unlike the other layers, which mostly all return objects that subclass
openstack.resource.Resource). Like the resource layer, you will typically
not need to use this directly but it can be helpful to interact with APIs that
have not or will not be supported by openstacksdk. For example:
import openstack
# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)
# Initialize connection
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')
# List servers
for server in openstack.compute.get('/servers').json():
print(server)openstacksdk uses the openstack.config module to parse configuration.
openstack.config will find cloud configuration for as few as one cloud and
as many as you want to put in a config file. It will read environment variables
and config files, and it also contains some vendor specific default values so
that you don't have to know extra info to use OpenStack
- If you have a config file, you will get the clouds listed in it
- If you have environment variables, you will get a cloud named envvars
- If you have neither, you will get a cloud named defaults with base defaults
You can view the configuration identified by openstacksdk in your current
environment by running openstack.config.loader. For example:
$ python -m openstack.config.loaderMore information at https://docs.openstack.org/openstacksdk/latest/user/config/configuration.html
The following services are currently supported. A full list of all available OpenStack service can be found in the Project Navigator.
Note
Support here does not guarantee full-support for all APIs. It simply means some aspect of the project is supported.
| Service | Description | Cloud Layer | Proxy & Resource Layer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | |||
| Nova | Compute | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.compute) |
| Hardware Lifecycle | |||
| Ironic | Bare metal provisioning | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.baremetal, openstack.baremetal_introspection) |
| Cyborg | Lifecycle management of accelerators | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.accelerator) |
| Storage | |||
| Cinder | Block storage | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.block_storage) |
| Swift | Object store | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.object_store) |
| Cinder | Shared filesystems | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.shared_file_system) |
| Networking | |||
| Neutron | Networking | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.network) |
| Octavia | Load balancing | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.load_balancer) |
| Designate | DNS | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.dns) |
| Shared services | |||
| Keystone | Identity | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.identity) |
| Placement | Placement | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.placement) |
| Glance | Image storage | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.image) |
| Barbican | Key management | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.key_manager) |
| Workload provisioning | |||
| Magnum | Container orchestration engine provisioning | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.container_infrastructure_management) |
| Orchestration | |||
| Heat | Orchestration | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.orchestration) |
| Senlin | Clustering | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.clustering) |
| Mistral | Workflow | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.workflow) |
| Zaqar | Messaging | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.message) |
| Application lifecycle | |||
| Masakari | Instances high availability service | ✔ | ✔ (openstack.instance_ha) |