Powering the OpenInfra Foundation’s CI/CD Cloud: A Look at Our Latest Contribution

We’re proud members of the OpenInfra Foundation, contributing technology and helping to drive innovation within the open source community. As such, our engineers recently re-provisioned the OpenInfra Foundation’s continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) cloud to our latest OpenStack Bobcat release (2023.2) with Ceph Reef storage. This robust platform powers one of the most demanding CI/CD pipelines in the open source world, automated by Zuul.

As OpenMetal’s Director of Cloud Systems Architecture, Yuriy Shyyan, put it, “There is something inherently awesome about having our main product – an OpenStack private cloud –  helping the community of thousands of developers continue to make improvements, develop new features, and improve the quality of OpenStack itself – one of the core software suites that we use to run our main flagship product.”

In the process, the OpenInfra team was able to take advantage of customization options and rebrand its metrics page as well as update the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). This transition also allowed optimizing IP address utilization for increased efficiency.

Visualizing the Powerhouse

These charts illustrate our cloud’s ongoing ability to handle the intense workload of the OpenInfra CI/CD pipeline. The average time to provision a VM is just 22 seconds, and we can comfortably manage 50 virtual machines (VMs) concurrently, supporting Zuul’s continuous cycle of creation, testing, and destruction.

Under the Hood

• Nodepool: The CI/CD pipeline relies on a nodepool comprising VMs hosted within our OpenMetal cloud. These VMs are the workhorses executing Zuul’s automated testing.
• Scalability: Our infrastructure comfortably handles 50 VMs running in parallel, each consuming approximately 8 GB of memory. This capacity ensures smooth operation even when Zuul requires multiple VMs for specific tests.
• Control Plane Optimization: We’ve dedicated a third of the control plane compute resources specifically for artifact mirrors, ensuring efficient distribution of artifacts. The remaining control plane capacity allows for running two VMs per control plane node. Recognizing the strain that intensive API operations can place on the control plane, we’ve configured it to run cooler than the compute nodes, ensuring stability and responsiveness.

OpenMetal was founded with a commitment to the open source community. We’ve benefitted from open source technology, and wanted to make it more accessible to all. We’ll continue to give back and strengthen its foundations. This initiative is just one way of doing so.

By providing a high-performance, reliable platform for OpenInfra’s CI/CD pipeline, we’re helping accelerate the development and advancement of OpenStack, a technology that benefits the entire ecosystem. We’re pleased to be recognized as a reliable and consistent infrastructure provider for the OpenInfra Foundation team.

To learn more about our initial engagement with Zuul, read the case study here.