Managing a Nova compute instance

Managing Nova compute instances, or virtual machines, is one of the main operations that we will be doing while working with OpenStack. This is where we run our applications. All of the previous recipes were steps toward creating a compute instance.

How to do it…

1. Let's begin by creating a compute instance, as follows:

- name: Deploy an instance
  os_server:
    state: present
    name: webserver
    image: cirros
    key_name: aditya
    security_groups: web-sg
    wait: yes
    flavor: m1.tiny
    auto_floating_ip: yes
    network: private
    meta:
      hostname: webserver.localdomain

2. If at any point we need to stop the instance, then we can use the os_server_action module as follows:

- name: stop the webserver
  os_server_action:
    action: stop
    server: webserver

How it works… 

In step 1, for creating a compute instance, we have specified a name that will be used to refer to the virtual machine at all times. We have also specified an image called cirros...