OpenStack Kolla-Ansible -- Deployment Engine

Introduction

Kolla-Ansible is the production-grade deployment engine for containerized OpenStack. It uses Ansible playbooks to deploy, configure, and manage Docker containers for each OpenStack service. Every core service -- Keystone, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Glance, Swift, Heat, Horizon -- plus supporting infrastructure (MariaDB, RabbitMQ, Memcached, HAProxy) runs in its own Docker container, managed through a single unified tool.

The Kolla project has two components: Kolla builds the Docker images for each OpenStack service. Kolla-Ansible deploys those images to target hosts using Ansible. In practice, most operators use pre-built images from the Kolla registry and only interact with Kolla-Ansible for deployment and lifecycle management.

Kolla-Ansible supports CentOS Stream 9, Rocky Linux 9, and Ubuntu 22.04 as host operating systems. Container images are available in two variants: source (built from OpenStack source code) and binary (built from distribution packages). For production stability, binary images pinned to a specific OpenStack release are recommended.

The deployment lifecycle follows four primary operations: bootstrap (prepare the host environment), deploy (install and start all services), reconfigure (change configuration on a running deployment), and upgrade (move to a new OpenStack release). Each operation is idempotent -- running it again produces the same result.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap prepares the host environment for OpenStack deployment. This is a one-time operation per host.

Prerequisites