Deckhand

Deckhand provides document revision management, storage and mutation functionality upon which the rest of the Airship components rely for orchestration of infrastructure provisioning. Deckhand understands declarative YAML documents that define, end-to-end, the configuration of sites: from the hardware -- encompassing network topology and hardware and host profile information -- up to the software level that comprises the overcloud.

• Free software: Apache license
• Documentation: https://airship-deckhand.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• Source: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/airship-deckhand
• Bugs: https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/1004
• Release notes: https://airship-deckhand.readthedocs.io/en/latest/releasenotes/index.html

Core Responsibilities

• layering - helps reduce duplication in configuration by applying the notion of inheritance to documents
• substitution - provides separation between secret data and other configuration data for security purposes and reduces data duplication by allowing common data to be defined once and substituted elsewhere dynamically
• revision history - maintains well-defined collections of documents within immutable revisions that are meant to operate together, while providing the ability to rollback to previous revisions
• validation - allows services to implement and register different kinds of validations and report errors
• secret management - leverages existing OpenStack APIs -- namely Barbican -- to reliably and securely store sensitive data

Getting Started

For more detailed installation and setup information, please refer to the Getting Started guide.

Integration Points

Deckhand has the following integration points:

• Barbican (OpenStack Key Manager) provides secure storage for sensitive data.
• Keystone (OpenStack Identity service) provides authentication and support for role based authorization.
• PostgreSQL is used to persist information to correlate workflows with users and history of workflow commands.

Note

Currently, other database back-ends are not supported.

Though, being a low-level service, has many other Airship services that integrate with it, including:

• Drydock is orchestrated by Shipyard to perform bare metal node provisioning.
• Promenade is indirectly orchestrated by Shipyard to configure and join Kubernetes nodes.
• Armada is orchestrated by Shipyard to deploy and test Kubernetes workloads.

Further Reading

Airship.