Self-service interface for developers to provision VMs

[quarckster]

OpenSSL developers should be able to provision VMs in a self-service manner.

Acceptance criteria

• to be discussed

[quarckster]

I tried to find some existing solutions. Google proposes a cloud management platform from CloudBolt. It's not free and costs money. I tried to deploy ManageIQ which has a self-service portal but it didn't work for me. There are the following possibilities:

• provide access to Google Compute Engine UI
• provide a script that deploys and destroys VMs
• provide a job on the automation server that deploys and destroys VMs
• provide everything mentioned above
• develop a custom self-service portal

[nhorman]

Just to ask the question, Would it be worth considering deploying a k8s cluster in GCE instead, and giving us access to depoloy various container images instead? Not sure what the cost difference is, or what the delta is in terms of needing to run different os-es, but the deployment model is somewhat easier for multiple users I think.

[arapov]

manageiq is dead, no? k8s controlplane is not cheap to run and is an overkill for "run-test-kill" image... it will also create an additional workload for maintaining this new service.

I am not saying no to this; just thinking out loud... I want to see something that will address these needs, although this "something" should be easy to maintain and inexpensive.

[levitte]

How about... our own hardware? Isn't this something that could be done much more easily (and "cost effectively") there?

[quarckster]

How about... our own hardware? Isn't this something that could be done much more easily (and "cost effectively") there?

When we deploy some virtualization platform that will replace raw libvirt it will be a part of the self-service portal. And it's unclear why self-service portal would be easier to make with our own hardware.

[Sashan]

I expect kind of command line tool. Eventually access to google cloud platform in web browser would work for me.

I'm using gcloud from google to manage my OpenBSD test boxes. I gave a try to terraform to deploy test networks. For console access i usually use google cloud platform web browser interface. My test boxes are just... test boxes. I just power it up, install fresh bits to test, test and power it off, that's it.

[levitte]

A detail: does "provision VMs" mean "firing up available VMs on demand" or "creating new VMs on demand"?

These are quite different choices, right?

I can't remember what was previously discussed in that regard.

[quarckster]

A detail: does "provision VMs" mean "firing up available VMs on demand" or "creating new VMs on demand"?

By provision, I mean creating and starting a VM from some image.

[levitte]

How about... our own hardware? Isn't this something that could be done much more easily (and "cost effectively") there?

When we deploy some virtualization platform that will replace raw libvirt it will be a part of the self-service portal. And it's unclear why self-service portal would be easier to make with our own hardware.

Do note that I didn't say anything about raw libvirt. Sure, that's what we've used so far on our hardware, but it doesn't mean we have to stick with it, there are other tools...

The message that I'm catching from multiple comments is a worry about running costs when doing this on GCP. Setting up some sort of provisioning on our own hardware should make that less of a worry, no?

[quarckster]

Setting up some sort of provisioning on our own hardware should make that less of a worry, no?

True and at the same time that's the point of the self-service portals. You can predefine machine configurations, limit running time and implement some janitor. So even with a cloud provider, the costs will be reasonable.