Open Stack

Greetings,

Last week we had an in-person Nova meetup.  Bluehost was a wonderful and
generous host.  Many thanks to them.  :-)

Here's some observations and a summary of some of the things that we
discussed:

1) Mark McClain (Neutron PTL) and and Mark Washenberger (Glance PTL)
both attended.  Having some cross-project discussion time was
*incredibly* useful, so I'm thankful they attended.  This makes me very
optimistic about our plans to have a cross-project day at the Atlanta
design summit.  We need to try to get as many opportunities as possible
for this sort of collaboration.

2) Gantt  - We discussed the progress of the Gantt effort.  After
discussing the problems encountered so far and the other scheduler work
going on, the consensus was that we really need to focus on decoupling
the scheduler from the rest of Nova while it's still in the Nova tree.

Don was still interested in working on the existing gantt tree to learn
what he can about the coupling of the scheduler to the rest of Nova.
Nobody had a problem with that, but it doesn't sound like we'll be ready
to regenerate the gantt tree to be the "real" gantt tree soon.  We
probably need another cycle of development before it will be ready.

As a follow-up to this, I wonder if we should rename the current gantt
repository from openstack/gantt to stackforge/gantt to avoid any
possible confusion.  We should make it clear that we don't expect the
current repo to be used yet.

3) v3 API - We discussed the current status of this effort, including
the tasks API, and all other v3 work.  There are some notes here:

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/NovaV3APIDoneCriteria

I actually think we need to talk about this some more before we mark v3
as stable.  I'll get notes together and start another thread soon.

4) We talked about Nova's integration with Neutron and made some good
progress.  We came up with a blueprint (ideally for Icehouse) to improve
Nova-Neutron interaction.

There are two cases we need to improve that have been particularly
painful.  The first is the network info cache.  Neutron can issue an API
callback to Nova to let us know that we need to refresh the cache.  The
second is knowing that VIF setup is complete.  Right now we have cases
where we issue a request to Neutron and it is processed asynchronously.
 We have no way to know when it has finished.  For example, we really
need to know that VIF plumbing is set up before we boot an instance and
it tries its DHCP request.  We can do this with nova-network, but with
Neutron it's just a giant race.  I'm actually surprised we've made it
this long without fixing this.

5) Driver CI - We talked about the ongoing effort to set up CI for all
of the compute drivers.  The discussion was mostly a status review.  At
this point, the Xenserver and Docker drivers are both at risk of being
removed from Nova for the Icehouse release if CI is not up and running
in time.

6) Upgrades - we discussed the state of upgrading Nova.  It was mostly a
review of the excellent progress being made this cycle.  Dan Smith has
been doing a lot of work to get us closer to where we can upgrade the
control services at once with downtime, but roll through upgrading the
computes later after service is back up.  Joe Gordon has been working on
automating the testing of this to make sure we don't break it, so that
should be running soon.


Lastly, everyone in attendance seemed to really enjoy it, and the
overwhelming vote in the room was for doing the same thing again during
the Juno cycle.  Dates and location TBD.

Thanks,

-- 
Russell Bryant