Open Stack

Capsule rec.juggling-style review
---------------------------------

**High:** Impossible to pick out one moment in particular, but in
general it was getting to chat informally over dinner/drinks/climbing
with other Stackers.  Thanks everyone for making me feel welcome!
**Low:** Spending four hours unable to get the keys for our AirBnB on
Monday, after barely sleeping the night before.
**Goal:** Meet people on the Ironic team, and put faces to IRC nicks.
This was a success, and it was great to meet everyone IRL.
**Bane:** The way most of the coffee stations ran out within minutes.
Was the intention that only the coffee in the marketplace and the
developer lounge would be replenished throughout the day? If so, this
wasn't communicated to me.

Tuesday
=======

Speed-mentoring
---------------
This was definitely worth getting up early for, and I am Not A Morning
Person. One concern: there were separate "technical" and "career"
tracks. A slight problem for those who are interested in both; but
also I noticed the "technical" track was heavily male-dominated and
the "career" track was heavily female-dominated. Not sure what that
says about us as an industry, but I doubt it's anything good.

Keynotes
--------
These were fun. I was particularly impressed by Rosie Bolton's use of
"zettabyte": I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've heard that
term used in anger.

Coffee break
------------
No coffee!

Design Summit 101
-----------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-design-summit-101
This was my first summit, so this session was really useful. Told me
what to expect and how to contribute effectively (which I hope I
managed to some extent).

Networking Approaches in a container world
------------------------------------------
(Antoni Segura Puimedon, Flavio Castelli, Neil Jerram)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePEXxbQ1fes
Gave a decent overview of the problem (providing logical networks
connecting ephemeral containers on different hosts), the two major
solutions (either tunnelling, or creating subnets for the containers
running on each host and using IP routing), the tradeoffs involved,
and which tools take which approach.

Baremetal Deployment work session
---------------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BCN-ops-baremetal-deploy
I wasn't able to contribute anything, but it was interesting and
useful to hear what approaches people are using.

Climbing
--------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-climb
The perfect conclusion to a tiring conference day! Huge thanks to
Chris Dent for organising this.

Wednesday
=========

Serverless: How to Build an Event-Driven, Polyglot Serverless 
Microservices Framework on OpenStack (Animesh Singh)
------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yA38yiUxig
This was honestly pretty horrifying. 15vCPUs, 26GB RAM, and 192 GB
disk footprint per invocation/s, so you can run snippets of
JavaScript? See the video at 7:08 for where I get these figures - I'd
love to be told I've misunderstood.

Empowering Ironic with Redfish support (Bruno Cornec)
-----------------------------------------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxRo5cRpj6k
Adding support to Ironic for talking to Redfish, a young but exciting
JSON/REST-based protocol for managing baremetal servers. Unfortunately
some crucial features are missing from the 1.0 release of the spec, so
we're already seeing incompatible vendor extensions: I asked a few
questions at the end about how we could avoid the nightmare scenario
described in http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=801.

Ironic API Evolution work session
---------------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-api-evolution
Fixing our API to make it more consistent, useful and
standards-compliant.  Devananda had already done a great job of
structuring this discussion, so it all went very smoothly, and it's
great to see patches already appearing.

Thursday
========

Ironic Work Session: Task framework
-----------------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-task-framework
I think we mostly managed to resist the temptation to spec out
something all-singing and all-dancing here.

Ironic Work Session: QA/CI
--------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-qa
I appear to have volunteered to help on splitting out our API tests
from our functional tests and to create a PoC for using property-based
unit tests, possibly using Hypothesis.

Tempest plugins roadmap
-----------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-qa-tempest-plugin-repos
Turns out the core purpose of Tempest is not what I'd thought. I'd
thought of it as a tool for end-to-end testing, for use in CI; the
project cores think of it as a standalone tool that can be used to
smoke-test an existing OpenStack cloud. Install OpenStack on your
data-center, via any means; install Tempest on your laptop; run the
one against the other. The "Tempest as CI tool" model implies that
tests can and should evolve with the code being tested; the "Tempest
as external smoke-tester" model implies that the tests can have no
knowledge of the precise version of OpenStack under test, and must be
able to determine everything they need to know by querying the cloud
under test. It also implies that Tempest plugins can't step on each
others' toes, because an operator will want to test *all* the
OpenStack services they've just deployed, not one at a time (as we can
do in the gate).

I think this fundamental difference in intended semantics was being
obscured by a lot of detailed arguments about packaging strategies;
now we've got to the bottom of it, I'm much happier with the proposed
approach. If I've understood the proposed approach correctly, the
Ironic team now needs to split ironic-tempest-plugin out into its own
branchless repo, under Ironic governance, and keep only black-box
full-stack API tests in there (white-box tests can stay in the main
Ironic repo and be versioned accordingly).

Ironic: Ocata Priorities
------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-priorities
See line 138 for what we decided; this session really helped me to get
a better sense of what's going on in Ironic-land and *why* certain
things are considered more important.

Friday
======

Ironic Work Session: VNC console proposals
------------------------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-vnc-console
We want to be able to provide graphical consoles to baremetal nodes
securely, but we can't assume much about what other services are
available - people run Ironic without the rest of OpenStack. For now
we're going to provide this via VNC processes running on the
conductor, rather than adding a dependency on Docker or Nova.

Ironic Work Session: Unblocking high-priority features
------------------------------------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-unblock-priorities
Lots of detailed task-by-task discussion about how we can get our
high-priority work done in the (short) Ocata cycle: read the etherpad
if you're interested.

Ironic Contributors meetup
--------------------------
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-ocata-summit-contributor-meetup
Discussion on the proposed new logo (we all preferred the old one :-(
), on what should be under Ironic governance (we decided on "must
follow TC rules; must support more than one vendor's hardware;
single-company contributors are OK"), and on whether the sets {ironic
cores} and {ironic-specs cores} should be identical (yes).

Ironic-Inspector Contributors meetup
------------------------------------
No video or etherpad, because this happened on the beach :-) Must work
on my Russian-language skills for next time - there was a point where
I was the only one present who *wasn't* a native Russian speaker, and
I felt rather guilty that everyone else had to speak in English to
include me.


Miles