[openstack-dev] [all] The future of the integrated release

Monty Taylor mordred at inaugust.com
Tue Aug 5 17:02:07 UTC 2014


On 08/05/2014 09:03 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> With the incredible growth of OpenStack, our development community is
> facing complex challenges. How we handle those might determine the
> ultimate success or failure of OpenStack.
>
> With this cycle we hit new limits in our processes, tools and cultural
> setup. This resulted in new limiting factors on our overall velocity,
> which is frustrating for developers. This resulted in the burnout of key
> firefighting resources. This resulted in tension between people who try
> to get specific work done and people who try to keep a handle on the big
> picture.
>
> It all boils down to an imbalance between strategic and tactical
> contributions. At the beginning of this project, we had a strong inner
> group of people dedicated to fixing all loose ends. Then a lot of
> companies got interested in OpenStack and there was a surge in tactical,
> short-term contributions. We put on a call for more resources to be
> dedicated to strategic contributions like critical bugfixing,
> vulnerability management, QA, infrastructure... and that call was
> answered by a lot of companies that are now key members of the OpenStack
> Foundation, and all was fine again. But OpenStack contributors kept on
> growing, and we grew the narrowly-focused population way faster than the
> cross-project population.
>
> At the same time, we kept on adding new projects to incubation and to
> the integrated release, which is great... but the new developers you get
> on board with this are much more likely to be tactical than strategic
> contributors. This also contributed to the imbalance. The penalty for
> that imbalance is twofold: we don't have enough resources available to
> solve old, known OpenStack-wide issues; but we also don't have enough
> resources to identify and fix new issues.
>
> We have several efforts under way, like calling for new strategic
> contributors, driving towards in-project functional testing, making
> solving rare issues a more attractive endeavor, or hiring resources
> directly at the Foundation level to help address those. But there is a
> topic we haven't raised yet: should we concentrate on fixing what is
> currently in the integrated release rather than adding new projects ?
>
> We seem to be unable to address some key issues in the software we
> produce, and part of it is due to strategic contributors (and core
> reviewers) being overwhelmed just trying to stay afloat of what's
> happening. For such projects, is it time for a pause ? Is it time to
> define key cycle goals and defer everything else ?
>
> On the integrated release side, "more projects" means stretching our
> limited strategic resources more. Is it time for the Technical Committee
> to more aggressively define what is "in" and what is "out" ? If we go
> through such a redefinition, shall we push currently-integrated projects
> that fail to match that definition out of the "integrated release" inner
> circle ?
>
> The TC discussion on what the integrated release should or should not
> include has always been informally going on. Some people would like to
> strictly limit to end-user-facing projects. Some others suggest that
> "OpenStack" should just be about integrating/exposing/scaling smart
> functionality that lives in specialized external projects, rather than
> trying to outsmart those by writing our own implementation. Some others
> are advocates of carefully moving up the stack, and to resist from
> further addressing IaaS+ services until we "complete" the pure IaaS
> space in a satisfactory manner. Some others would like to build a
> roadmap based on AWS services. Some others would just add anything that
> fits the incubation/integration requirements.
>
> On one side this is a long-term discussion, but on the other we also
> need to make quick decisions. With 4 incubated projects, and 2 new ones
> currently being proposed, there are a lot of people knocking at the door.
>
> Thanks for reading this braindump this far. I hope this will trigger the
> open discussions we need to have, as an open source project, to reach
> the next level.

Yes.

Additionally, and I think we've been getting better at this in the 2 
cycles that we've had an all-elected TC, I think we need to learn how to 
say no on technical merit - and we need to learn how to say "thank you 
for your effort, but this isn't working out" Breaking up with someone is 
hard to do, but sometimes it's best for everyone involved.

I'm wary of explicit answers in the form of policy at this point - I 
think we've spent far too long using policy as a shield from hard 
questions. The questions of "Is OpenStack IaaS, or should it also be 
PaaS" I think are useless questions that exist only to further the lives 
of analysts, journalists and bloggers. Instead, I'd love to focus more 
on "what is software that solves problems" and "what is software that 
solves problems that we're in a good position to solve" So if Savanna 
solves problems for users well in a way that makes sense, I'd hate to 
exclude it because it didn't meet a policy's pre-conceived notion that 
Hadoop is not "IaaS" or even "IaaS+" You know what I NEVER do when I'm 
working on deploying services? I never say "Hey Jim, we should go 
operate our IaaS resources" Literally, it has never happened.

Finally, as it pertains to technical merits, and at the risk of 
magicking myself into a corner of defining a policy after saying I don't 
like them ... I'd really like to think a bit more about the nature of 
what we do and what we excel at. I'll be the first to admit I've been 
involved in transgressions of this - but I believe it's becoming clear 
to me that where we as a general community and as a software project 
excel are the places where we're orchestrating and/or gluing things 
together that are existing technologies. Nova orchestrates hypervisors, 
cinder provides iscsi, keystone has long resisted being a user 
management system and instead is a glue layer between openstack services 
and existing user management systems. Trove orchestrates databases - it 
did not attempt to write an RDBMS from scratch in python. Simply turning 
that into a rule of thumb is perhaps overly simplistic and could lead 
into the dangerous land of adhering to policy in the face of sanity. But 
for myself, I'm going to be thinking about all of our projects through 
that lens over the coming months. Please don't be surprised or take it 
personally if I start suggesting that we've been too liberal in 
suggesting projects that sit on the other side of that line, and that 
perhaps its time to bring that chapter in our evolution to a close.

Monty



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