Open Stack

Hi all,

I doubt anyone would dispute that High Availability is a really
important topic within OpenStack, yet none of the OpenStack
conferences or Design Summits so far have provided an "official" track
or similar dedicated space for discussion on HA topics.

This is becoming increasingly problematic as the number of HA topics
increase.  For example, in Austin a group of us spent something like
15 hours together over 3-4 days for design sessions around the future
of HA for the compute plane.

This is not by any means the only HA topic which needs discussing.
Other possible topics:

  - Input from operators on their experiences of deployment,
    maintenance, and effectiveness of highly available OpenStack
    infrastructure

  - Adding or improving HA support in existing projects, e.g.

      - cinder-volume active/active work is currently ongoing

      - neutron always has ongoing HA topics - the hot one in
        Austin seemed to be HA+DVR+SNAT.

      - We had some great discussions with the Congress team in
        Austin, which may need follow-up.

      - mistral is involved in ongoing HA work.

      - The various projects playing on the HA scene (Senlin is
        another example) need the opportunity to sync up with each
        other to become aware of any opportunities for integration or
        potential overlap.

  - Documentation (the official HA guide)

  - Different / new approaches to HA of the control plane
    (e.g. Pacemaker vs. systemd vs. other clustering technologies)

  - Testing and hardening of existing HA architectures (e.g. via
    projects such as cloud99)

Whilst we do have the #openstack-ha IRC channel, weekly IRC meetings,
and of course the mailing lists, I think it would be helpful to have
an official space in the design summits for continuation of those
technical discussions face-to-face.

Granted, some of the above topics could be discussed in the related
project track (cinder, neutron, congress, documentation etc.).  But
this does not provide a forum for detailed technical discussion on
cross-project initiatives such as compute HA, or architectural debates
which don't relate to a single project, or work on HA projects which
don't have their own dedicated track in the Design Summit.

Therefore I would like to propose that future Design Summits adopt an
official HA "mini-track" (I guess one day might be sufficient), and
I'd really appreciate hearing opinions on this proposal.

Also the idea meets enough favour, it would be useful to find it
whether it's already too late to arrange this for Barcelona :-)

Thanks a lot!
Adam

P.S. Maybe a similar proposal on a smaller scale would be valid for
some of the operator and regional meetups too?