Enablement of Ceph Dashboard

Problem Description

The ceph-mon charm provides the cluster monitor daemon for the Ceph distributed file system. It currently does not support enablement of the Ceph Manager built-in Dashboard. It is a web-based Ceph management and monitoring application through which you can inspect and administer various aspects and resources within the cluster. It is implemented as a Ceph Manager Daemon module.

Proposed Change

The proposed solution is to make the dashboard available and default enabled in a new subordinate charm to ceph-mon. SSL endpoint termination would be done using the certificates relation or by providing the ssl_cert, ssl_key and ssl_ca configuration options. User management would be done with the use of charm actions.

The upstream documentation of Ceph mentions Dashboard is supported, (https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/mgr/dashboard/). The new feature would be supported on Ceph Octopus, OpenStack Victoria (and later) on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The subordinate charm will enable access to the dashboard via the hostnames of the mon units. However, the hostname may not map to the desired network space, the operator may not be able to resolve the juju unit hostnames and the failure of a single mon unit may make the dashboard inaccessable if the operator was accessing the dashboard via that mon. To resolve these issues the dashboard charm will support a relation to an OpenStack loadbalancer application (as yet unwritten) which will manage an haproxy instance and a vip via the hacluster subordinate. If this relation is present the dashboard standby units will be configured to return a 500 enabling haproxy to determine the active dashboard unit. Both the loadbalancer and the dashboard charm will support SSL endpoint termination via a relation to vault or via configuration options. The delivery of the dashboard subordinate should be the initial focus of this work with the loadbalacer following soon after.

Alternatives

Grafana offers some visualization possibilities, but it is limited to view only experience.

Out of Scope

Features

Feature

In Scope

Multi-User and Role Management

✓

Single Sign-On (SSO)

X

SSL/TLS support

✓

Auditing

✓

Embedded Grafana Dashboards

✓

Monitoring (Prometheus & Alertmanager)

X

iSCSI

X

RBD

✓

RBD mirroring

X

CephFS

X

Object Gateway

✓

NFS

X

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Liam Young <liam.young@canonical.com>

Gerrit Topic

Use Gerrit topic “ceph-dashboard” for all patches related to this spec.

git-review -t ceph-dashboard

Work Items

  • Implement a new operator framework subordinate charm, ceph-dashboard

  • Add a charm option for toggling ceph mgr dashboard

  • Add a relation that implements SSL endpoint configuration

  • Add actions to manage user accounts

    • Create admin user

  • write unit tests

  • extend current functional tests using the zaza test framework (a functional test should include deploying ceph-mon with ceph-dashboard added, without user management actions)

  • Create generic service loadbalancer charm.

  • Add a relation to a loadbalancer service which will provide a HA vip for accessing the dashboard.

Timeline

The goal is to implement this change in the OpenStack Charms 21.10 release.

Repositories

During initial development the code will be managed here:

https://github.com/openstack-charmers/charm-ceph-dashboard

When ready the charm will be managed via OpenDev gerrit.

https://opendev.org/openstack/charm-ceph-dashboard

Documentation

The charm should contain documented options:

  • Create charm options

  • Create charm actions

  • Create charm relations

  • Create charm README

  • Update of the official charm deployment guide: [0]

[0]: https://docs.openstack.org/project-deploy-guide/charm-deployment-guide/

Security

The Dashboard endpoint has to be TLS-terminated, therefore, an option to provide a CA certificate is required.

Testing

Code changes will be covered by unit tests. Functional tests would require ceph OSD hardware or software emulation. This is possible through Ceph cluster deployment. The deployment of the ceph cluster would be independent from the OpenStack bundle.

Dependencies

  • This charm will support OpenStack Victoria and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal as its baseline

  • A new project will need to be created based on the OpenStack Project Creator’s Guide <https://docs.openstack.org/infra/manual/creators.html>