_________       .__  _____  __                      .__                
 /   _____/_  _  _|__|/ ____\/  |______    ____  __ __|  | _____ _______ 
 \_____  \\ \/ \/ /  \   __\\   __\__  \ _/ ___\|  |  \  | \__  \\_  __ \
 /        \\     /|  ||  |   |  |  / __ \\  \___|  |  /  |__/ __ \|  | \/
/_______  / \/\_/ |__||__|   |__| (____  /\___  >____/|____(____  /__|   
        \/                             \/     \/                \/       

OpenStack Swift and Ansible

This repository will create a virtualized OpenStack Swift cluster using Vagrant, libvirt, Ansible.

Table of Contents

• OpenStack Swift and Ansible - Table of Contents
  • tl;dr
  • Supported Operating Systems and OpenStack Releases
    • Fedora 40
    • Ubuntu 24.04
  • Features
  • Requirements
  • Virtual machines created
  • Networking setup
  • Self-signed certificates
  • Using the swift command line client
  • Starting over
  • Modules
  • Issues

tl;dr

Note this will start seven virtual machines on your computer.

# Clone swiftaucular repo
$ cd swiftacular
# Install prerequisites on the host
$ ./install_prereqs.sh
# Deploy Swift and monitoring dashboards
$ ./bootstrap_swift_with_monitoring.sh

Supported Operating Systems and OpenStack Releases

Hosting on Fedora 40

VM	Swift Version	Status
CentOS Stream 9	OpenStack stable/2025.1	Supported
Ubuntu 24.04	OpenStack stable/2025.1	WIP

Hosting on Ubuntu 22.04

VM	Swift Version	Status
CentOS Stream 9	OpenStack stable/2025.1	Supported
Ubuntu 24.04	OpenStack stable/2025.1	WIP

By default, vagrant will use CentOS Stream 9:

$ vagrant up

To use Ubuntu 24.04 instead:

$ VM_BOX=ubuntu vagrant up

Features

• Run OpenStack Swift in vms on your local computer, but with multiple servers
• Replication network is used, which means this could be a basis for a geo-replication system
• SSL - Keystone is configured to use SSL and the Swift Proxy is proxied by an SSL server
• Sparse files to back Swift disks
• Tests for uploading files into Swift
• Use of gauntlt attacks to verify installation

Hardware Requirements

Minimal Host Requirements: CPU: 6 vCPUs RAM: 16 GB Disk: ~120 GB

Recommended Host Requirements: CPU: 16+ vCPUs RAM: 64+ GB Disk: 500 GB+ SSD (preferably NVMe)

Virtual machines created

Seven Vagrant-based virtual machines are used for this playbook:

• package_cache - One apt-cacher-ng server so that you don't have to download packages from the Internet over and over again, only once
• authentication - One Keystone server for authentication
• lbssl - One SSL termination server that will be used to proxy connections to the Swift Proxy server
• swift-proxy - One Swift proxy server
• swift-storage - Three Swift storage nodes

Networking setup

Each vm will have four networks (technically five including the Vagrant network). In a real production system every server would not need to be attached to every network, and in fact you would want to avoid that. In this case, they are all attached to every network.

• eth0 - Used by Vagrant
• eth1 - 192.168.100.0/24 - The "public" network that users would connect to
• eth2 - 10.0.10.0/24 - This is the network between the SSL terminator and the Swift Proxy
• eth3 - 10.0.20.0/24 - The local Swift internal network
• eth4 - 10.0.30.0/24 - The replication network which is a feature of OpenStack Swift starting with the Havana release

Self-signed certificates

Because this playbook configures self-signed SSL certificates and by default the swift client will complain about that fact, either the --insecure option needs to be used or alternatively the SWIFTCLIENT_INSECURE environment variable can be set to true.

Using the swift command line client

You can install the swift client anywhere that you have access to the SSL termination point and Keystone. So you could put it on your local laptop as well, probably with:

$ pip install python-swiftclient

However, I usually login to the package_cache server and use swift from there.

$ vagrant ssh swift-package-cache-01
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ . /vagrant/testrc 
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ swift list
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ echo "swift is cool" > swift.txt
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ swift upload swifty swift.txt 
swift.txt
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ swift list
swifty
vagrant@swift-package-cache-01:~$ swift list swifty
swift.txt

Starting over

If you want to redo the installation there are a few ways.

To restart completely:

$ ./cleanup.sh
$ ./bootstrap_swift_with_monitoring.sh

There is a script to destroy and rebuild everything but the package cache:

$ ./bin/redo
$ ansible -m ping all # just to check if networking is up
$ ansible-playbook deploy_swift_cluster.yml

To remove and redo only the rings and fake/sparse disks without destroying any virtual machines:

$ ansible-playbook playbooks/remove_rings.yml
$ ansible-playbook deploy_swift_cluster.yml

To remove the keystone database and redo the endpoints, users, regions, etc:

$ ansible-playbook ./playbook/remove_keystone.yml
$ ansible-playbook deploy_swift_cluster.yml

To change debug level output of Vagrant

export VAGRANT_LOG=debug

Modules

• library/swift-ansible-modules/keystone_user

Issues

See the issues in the tracking tracking system on Github for Swiftacular.