Deploying complex systems on OpenStack can be a challenge.

A small website running MediaWiki can happily fit on a single server, but the same software running at the Wikipedia scale is much more demanding. You need to deal with multiple database servers, webservers, load balancers, failover, networking configuration, IP address assignment and more.

The Heat project allows you to describe all the resources and their relationships in a single template, launch everything with one command and keep it up. You can easily combine the workflow with existing configuration management tools such as Puppet or Chef.

Initially modeled after Amazon CloudFormation, Heat is a free and open source component for OpenStack and has recently been accepted into OpenStack incubation.

This session will provide an overview of Heat's capabilities and how to use them, followed by a live demonstration. At the end you will understand Heat well enough to decide whether it is useful in your environment and how to get started with it.