Open Stack

Folks,

It's come to our attention that some key individuals are not
fully up-to-date on gnocchi activities, so it being a good and
healthy thing to ensure we're as communicative as possible about
our roadmap, I've provided a high-level overview here of our
thinking. This is intended as a precursor to further discussion
with the TC.

Cheers,
Eoghan


What gnocchi is:
===============

Gnocchi is a separate, but related, project spun up on stackforge
by Julien Danjou, with the objective of providing efficient
storage and retrieval of timeseries-oriented data and resource
representations.

The goal is to experiment with a potential approach to addressing
an architectural misstep made in the very earliest days of
ceilometer, specifically the decision to store snapshots of some
resource metadata alongside each metric datapoint. The core idea
is to move to storing datapoints shorn of metadata, and instead
allow the resource-state timeline to be reconstructed more cheaply
from much less frequently occurring events (e.g. instance resizes
or migrations).


What gnocchi isn't:
==================

Gnocchi is not a large-scale under-the-radar rewrite of a core
OpenStack component along the lines of keystone-lite.

The change is concentrated on the final data-storage phase of
the ceilometer pipeline, so will have little initial impact on the
data-acquiring agents, or on transformation phase.

We've been totally open at the Atlanta summit and other forums
about this approach being a multi-cycle effort.


Why we decided to do it this way:
================================

The intent behind spinning up a separate project on stackforge
was to allow the work progress at arms-length from ceilometer,
allowing normalcy to be maintained on the core project and a
rapid rate of innovation on gnocchi.

Note that that the developers primarily contributing to gnocchi
represent a cross-section of the core team, and there's a regular
feedback loop in the form of a recurring agenda item at the
weekly team meeting to avoid the effort becoming silo'd.


But isn't re-architecting frowned upon?
======================================

Well, the architecture of other OpenStack projects have also
under-gone change as the community understanding of the
implications of prior design decisions has evolved.

Take for example the move towards nova no-db-compute & the
unified-object-model in order to address issues in the nova
architecture that made progress towards rolling upgrades
unneccessarily difficult.

The point, in my understanding, is not to avoid doing the
course-correction where it's deemed necessary. Rather, the
principle is more that these corrections happen in an open
and planned way.


The path forward:
================

A subset of the ceilometer community will continue to work on
gnocchi in parallel with the ceilometer core over the remainder
of the Juno cycle and into the Kilo timeframe. The goal is to
have an initial implementation of gnocchi ready for tech preview
by the end of Juno, and to have the integration/migration/
co-existence questions addressed in Kilo.

Moving the ceilometer core to using gnocchi will be contingent
on it demonstrating the required performance characteristics and
providing the semantics needed to support a v3 ceilometer API
that's fit-for-purpose.