Automation & Infrastructure as Code

Clicking through Horizon and the Cloud Services Portal is fine for a first VM, but for repeatable infrastructure you want code. This page points you at the three supported automation paths: the OpenStack CLI (OSC), Terraform, and Ansible.

Prerequisites

• A Linux workstation (or VM) with egress to the OpenStack API on port 443.
• Basic shell knowledge.
• An Application Credential from Horizon (see below).

1. Get an Application Credential

For any automation you need credentials that don't require interactive login. Application Credentials are the recommended option — they're project-scoped, revocable, and don't expose your Horizon password.

In Horizon: Identity → Application Credentials → Create Application Credential. Download the resulting clouds.yaml and place it at ~/.config/openstack/clouds.yaml.

Save the secret now

The Application Credential Secret is shown only once. If you lose it, you must create a new Application Credential.

• Application Credentials
• Export session token (alternative, 24h)

2. Install the OpenStack CLI (OSC)

OSC unifies compute, identity, image, object storage, and block storage commands into one shell. We recommend installing it with uv, which works in both regions.

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv tool update-shell
curl https://opendev.org/openstack/requirements/raw/branch/stable/2025.1/upper-constraints.txt -fsSL -o /tmp/upper-constraints-2025.1.txt
uv tool install --python 3.12 python-openstackclient -c "/tmp/upper-constraints-2025.1.txt"

The full command sequence with all service clients is in the installation guide.

Set OS_CLOUD=openstack (matching the top-level key in your clouds.yaml) and verify:

openstack image list

Full OSC installation guide

3. Deploy with OSC

A one-shot VM deploy:

openstack server create vm-u2404-az2 \
   --image "Ubuntu 24.04" \
   --flavor m1.small \
   --key-name foo-key \
   --network foo-net \
   --security-group default \
   --availability-zone ch-zh1-az2

4. Deploy with Terraform

Terraform is the recommended path for production infrastructure — declarative state, plan/apply workflow, and module reuse.

Full Terraform installation guide

resource "openstack_compute_instance_v2" "instance_1" {
   name            = "vm-u2404-az2"
   image_name      = "Ubuntu 24.04"
   flavor_name     = "m1.micro"
   key_pair        = "foo-key"
   security_groups = ["default"]
   availability_zone = "ch-zh1-az2"

   network { name = "foo-net" }
}

5. Deploy with Ansible

If you already run Ansible, the os_server module deploys instances directly:

Full Ansible installation guide

- os_server:
    name: "foo-u2404-az2"
    image: "Ubuntu 24.04"
    key_name: "foo-key"
    flavor: "m1.micro"
    network: "foo-net"
    security_groups: "default"
    availability_zone: "ch-zh1-az2"

OSC / Ansible / Terraform examples

Heat orchestration

Heat (OpenStack's native orchestration engine) is not offered on this platform. Use Terraform or Ansible for infrastructure-as-code.

Next step

You now have the full picture — concepts, login, first VM, first bucket, and automation. The Glossary is your reference for unfamiliar terms, and the rest of the documentation goes deeper:

• OpenStack — networking, load balancers, IPv6, port forwarding, DNS.
• Cloud Services Portal — backups, Kubernetes, quota management, usage.
• AI — Everyware AI API for chat, embeddings, and rerank.