Automation of the infrastructure and services for an openstack deployment using chef tool

The legacy automatic deployments of OpenStack are mostly focused on specific packets and configurations. This paper investigates the possibility to automate the deployment of both OpenStack and the underlying architecture at once (minimum one Controller Node and one Compute Node). The Chef tool proved to be a good candidate, together with Vagrant (for automatic creation and configuration of virtual environments) and VirtualBox (as hypervisor). Comparing to the manual installation, the time needed to have a fully functional solution decreased from more than 30 minutes/node (or hours for unexperienced or unlucky system admins) to 10 minutes/node (or even just 2 minutes/node if the Vagrant box has been executed before). As a major drawback, Chef does not know how to handle prompts from installed packages which imposed developing a workaround.