Demo Video: Using Heat for Auto-scaling with OpenStack cloud

A few weeks ago we told you about OpenStack's orchestration component, code-named Heat. Heat is designed to assist in the installation and management of your OpenStack clusters.

One of the more compelling functions you can accomplish using Heat is auto scaling your cluster up and down as the workload demands. For example, you might add another host machine if CPU is running at more than 50% on the existing machines. Similarly, once the workload has been processed, you might want to bring down some of the extra hosts when their capacity is no longer necessary.

One thing that's hard to see any description, however, is what it actually looks like when it's in use. To that end, two of our Mirantis engineers, Sergey Kraynev and Ksenia Demina, have put together a quick demo that shows you Heat in action, both in terms of using auto scaling decide to cluster up and down, and a quick look at how heat "stacks" appear in the Horizon dashboard.