The mission for this project is to provide a way to make third-party applications and services running on VMs or even external services available as self-service for OpenStack. These applications may be a simple, a single VM or complex, multi tier applications with autoscaling and self healing.
From the third-party tool developer’s perspective, the application catalog will provide a way to publish applications and services, including deployment rules and requirements, suggested configuration, output parameters and billing rules. It will also provide a way to track billing and usage information.
From the user’s perspective, the application catalog will be a place to find and self-provision third-party applications and services, integrate them into their environment, and track usage information and costs.
The Application Catalog project integrates all OpenStack components directly and indirectly via Heat. The Ceilometer service will collect usage information, which the Murano-API will use during billing rules processing to calculate billing information.
The Murano API will expose API calls to manage (CRUD) services available for deployment. This API will be used by the Service admin user interface to simplify Service management.
Catalog administrators also configure Role-Based Access Control rules (RBAC), which define which end users (which are associated with tenants) of the cloud have access to which services in the catalog, and whether they may be directly deployed or must be approved before deployment (see End User use cases). The billing rules for a particular service may also be defined specifically for a given tenant or a given user.