Kolla Ansible

Kolla Ansible deploys and operates OpenStack clouds using production ready containers, with the Kolla project's stated mission being to provide both those containers and the tooling to run them.

Its design philosophy is deliberately stated and unusually honest: highly opinionated out of the box, but allowing complete customisation. That combination is what makes it useful across experience levels. An operator with minimal OpenStack experience can deploy a working cloud quickly by accepting the defaults, then modify the configuration to exact requirements as understanding grows.

Getting that balance right is harder than it sounds and is where most deployment tools fail in one direction or the other. Tools that expose every option overwhelm a newcomer before anything runs, while tools that hide everything become useless the moment a real requirement falls outside the assumptions.

Containerising OpenStack services is the technical foundation, giving consistent, repeatable deployments and cleaner upgrades than package based installation, where a partial upgrade can leave a control plane in a state nobody intended. Container images are built through the separate Kolla image project, documented independently. The documentation is continuously updated against the development branch, with previous releases accessible by appending the OpenStack release name to the URL. It is a free and open source OpenStack project with community support.