I want to deploy a private cloud test infrastructure using OpenStack and Jenkins for multiple projects. I thought of creating a template for OpenStack with one Jenkins installation using as master. For the projects I thought of separating them into nodes, i.e. each project would get one node. Is this a sensible structure? Or should I install one Jenkins installtion per project+vm?
1) How would you organize a private multi-project test cloud infrastructure?
2) Jenkins saves configuration and job information to /var/lib/jenkins by default, how do I manage the object storage for each project?
When you say node, I’m assuming you mean a machine running nova-compute and hosting VM instances. If this is the case, then I honestly wouldn’t worry about trying to bind a project to a specific node – treat the entire openstack pool of resources you have as a global cluster, assign in projects, and let them spin up and tear down as they need.
You will likely find it beneficial to have an image with jenkins pre-installed as a publically available image, assuming you want a master jenkins per project in your cloud. If you’re running jenkins as a stand-alone item per project, using a m1.medium may be sufficient, but you might find you want to use m1.large. It all depends on what you have your jenkins instance doing in each project.
If you want the jenkins data to persist across destroying and recreating the jenkins master instance, then you could use a volume and specifically mount /var/lib/jenkins into it – but you will need to manage the coordination of jenkins startup and having the volume attached appropriately. You may find it easier to give the jenkins instance a larger base disk and just back up and restore the data per project if you need to destroy and recreate the jenkins instance.
Another way to do this would be to share a master jenkins external to your openstack cloud and use the jclouds jenkins plugin to spin up jenkins instances and slaves as you need for projects. This isn’t providing any segregation between projects in jenkins, which may not be to your liking based on the question above.