Step 16: Let’s get to know HEAT better

Start

At first glance, it might look like that creating a VM via a heat template and directly via the OpenStack client take the same time, while this is true if you only want to create the VM once, this is true but the real advantage to heat is in reusing templates.

Now that we have our simple template, we’ll get to know heat a bit better by adding a variable parameter to our template.

Parameter

In this example, we’ll add a parameter for the SSH key. The advantage of this is that we can use a VM with different keys without changing our template.

We need to define the parameter and also define its type, the proper type for what we want to accomplish is string:

heat_template_version: 2014-10-16
 
parameters:
    key_name:
        type: string

Now that we’ve defined our first parameter, we’ll add the same resource to our template like this:

heat_template_version: 2014-10-16

parameters:
    key_name:
        type: string


resources:
    Instanz:
    type: OS::Nova::Server
    properties:
        key_name: Beispiel
        image: Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus - Latest
        flavor: m1.small

Now we’ll actually use our parameter, we’ll replace Beispiel with our parameter.

This is done with the get_param syntax (for getting the parameter).

The template is now ready to use and we can define the key_name from the command line like in our previous command line:

heat_template_version: 2014-10-16

parameters:
    key_name:
        type: string

resources:
    Instanz:
    type: OS::Nova::Server
    properties:
        key_name: { get_param: key_name }
        image: Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus - Latest
        flavor: m1.small

Conclusion

We’ve now added a variable parameter to our template! In the next step, we will add the network.