Skip to content

Try Azimuth

If you have access to a project on an OpenStack cloud, you can try Azimuth!

The azimuth-config repository contains a special environment called demo that will provision a short-lived Azimuth deployment for demonstration purposes only. This environment attempts to infer all required configuration from the target OpenStack cloud - if this process is unsuccessful, an error will be produced.

Danger

Inferring configuration in the way that the demo environment does is not recommended as it is not guaranteed to produce the same result each time. For production deployments it is better to be explicit.

To get started with a production deployment, see the best practice guide.

Deploying a demo instance

The Azimuth deployment requires a clouds.yaml to run. Ideally, this should be an Application Credential.

Once you have a clouds.yaml, run the following to deploy the Azimuth demo environment:

# Set OpenStack configuration variables
export OS_CLOUD=openstack
export OS_CLIENT_CONFIG_FILE=/path/to/clouds.yaml

# Clone the azimuth-config repository
git clone https://github.com/stackhpc/azimuth-config
cd azimuth-config

# Set up the virtual environment
./bin/ensure-venv

# Activate the demo environment
source ./bin/activate demo

# Install Ansible dependencies
ansible-galaxy install -f -r requirements.yml

# Deploy Azimuth
ansible-playbook stackhpc.azimuth_ops.provision

The URL for the Azimuth UI is printed at the end of the playbook run. The credentials you use to authenticate with Azimuth are the same as you would use with the underlying OpenStack cloud.

Warning

Azimuth is deployed using Ansible, which does not support Windows as a controller. Azimuth deployment has been tested on Linux and macOS.

Limitations

The demo deployment has a number of limitations in order to give it the best chance of running on any given cloud:

  • It uses the single node deployment method.
  • Community images are uploaded as private images, so Azimuth will only be able to provision Kubernetes clusters and Cluster-as-a-Service appliances in the same project as it is deployed in.
  • sslip.io is used to provide DNS. This avoids the need for a DNS entry to be provisioned in advance.
  • TLS is disabled for ingress, allowing the Azimuth to work even when the deployment is not reachable from the internet (outbound internet connectivity is still required).
  • Verification of SSL certificates for the OpenStack API is disabled, allowing Azimuth to work even when the target cloud uses a custom CA.
  • The deployment secrets are not secret, as they are stored in plain text in the azimuth-config repository on GitHub.
Last update: April 9, 2024
Created: April 9, 2024