Open Stack

Excerpts from Jay Pipes's message of 2016-09-09 13:03:42 -0400:
> On 09/09/2016 06:22 AM, John Davidge wrote:
> > Thierry Carrez wrote:
> >
> >> [...]
> >> In the last years there were a lot of "questions" asked by random
> >> contributors, especially around the "One OpenStack" principle (which
> >> seems to fuel most of the reaction here). Remarks like "we should really
> >> decide once and for all if OpenStack is a collection of independent
> >> projects, or one thing".
> >>
> >> A lot of people actually ignore that this question was already asked,
> >> pretty early on (by John Dickinson in June 2011). Back then it was
> >> settled by the PPB (the ancestor to the TC). You can read it all
> >> here[1]. It was never brought again as a proposed change to the TC, so
> >> that decision from June 2011 is still defining how we should think about
> >> OpenStack.
> >>
> >> Most of the TC members know the governance history and know those
> >> principles. That is, after all, one of the reasons you elect them for.
> >> But we realized that the people asking those questions again and again
> >> were not at fault. It was our failure to *document* this history
> >> properly which caused the issue. Took us some time to gather the courage
> >> to write it, then finally Monty wrote a draft, and I turned it into a
> >> change.
> >
> > To provide a counter point, I think the reason this question is asked so
> > often is not because the TC has failed to *document* this policy, but that
> > it has failed to *comply* with it.
> 
> The TC doesn't comply with anything at all. It's the body that is 
> elected to make overarching governance decisions for the OpenStack 
> community.
> 
> > I¹m of course referring to the introduction of The Big Tent.
> 
> And I'm of course going to correct your misstatements below about what 
> the Big Tent (formally called the Project Structure Reform) was about.
> 
>  > This is the
> > moment that OpenStack stopped being: ³A single product made of a lot of
> > independent, but cooperating, components.² And became: ³A collection of
> > independent projects that work together for some level of integration and
> > releases.²
> 
> You are mistaken, I'm sorry to say.
> 
> Firstly, your statement that OpenStack stopped being "a single product" 
> at some point is just flat-out wrong. It never *was* a single product, 
> regardless of whether some time in 2011 seven individuals on the project 
> policy board said that that was the direction they preferred the 
> community to go in.
> 
> OpenStack was never a single product made of a lot of independent but 
> cooperating components. From the very beginning of OpenStack-time, Swift 
> and Nova were never designed or planned as a single product. To this 
> *day*, Swift is its own product with very few pieces of integration with 
> some other OpenStack projects where relevant (Keystone) but there was 
> never any push or reason to have Swift become simply a "part of a single 
> OpenStack product".
> 
> Secondly, the Big Tent was about changing the process by which new 
> projects applying to become "OpenStack projects" were evaluated by the 
> TC. We went from a situation of evaluating new projects using 
> subjective, often contradicting and changing opinions on architectural 
> and software design to instead evaluating new project teams on whether 
> the project team followed "The OpenStack Way" (followed the 4 Opens and 
> furthered the mission of OpenStack)
> 
> The Big Tent **was not a redefinition of what OpenStack was or is**.
> 
> > This is in direct contradiction to the stated and collectively understood
> > goal of the project, and has left many scratching their heads.
> 
> I don't know what you are referring to above as "the stated and 
> collectively understood goal of the project". Are you referring to the 
> OpenStack Mission Statement? If so, see point above. The Big Tent didn't 
> change the Mission nor did it redefine what OpenStack was.
> 
> > The principles as written in the review do not accurately describe the
> > current state of the project. To make it so that they do, we either need
> > to change the principles or change the project. As I see it, our options
> > are:
> >
> > 1. Adjust the project to reflect the principles by abolishing The Big Tent.
> > 2. Adjust the principles to reflect the project by redefining it as: ³A
> > collection of independent projects that work together for some level of
> > integration and releases.²
> >
> > Personally, my vote is for option 1.
> 
> Sounds to me like you are just complaining about OpenStack having too 
> many projects in it. If so, please tell us which projects you would have 
> leave OpenStack.
> 
> No more deployment projects? Cut Triple-O, Fuel, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, 
> Saltstack, devstack.
> 
> No more competing implementations of things? Cut Ceilometer or Monasca. 
> Your choice.
> 
> No more Telco-specific stuff? Cut Tacker, networking-sfc, and a whole 
> host of other stuff.
> 
> My vote is definitely for something #2-like, as I've said before and on 
> the review, I believe OpenStack should be a "cloud toolkit" composed of 
> well-scoped and limited services in the vein of the UNIX model of do one 
> thing and do it well. I believe that vendors and cloud providers should 
> be able to choose services and tools from this OpenStack cloud toolkit 
> to build clouds, cloud products, and products that utilize OpenStack 
> service APIs to please customers.
> 
> It makes sense for many of those cloud toolkit services and components 
> to integrate well with each other via public, stable interfaces and 
> there's nothing about OpenStack being a collection of cloud tools that 
> prevents or discourages that integration.
> 
> Best,
> -jay

I don't see a conflict with saying that what we're producing is a
set of things that can be composed in different ways depending on
need, but that the way we produce them is through a unified community
with common practices, tools, and patterns. To me, this statement
about One OpenStack is about emphasizing those commonalities and
working together to increase them, with the combined goals of
improving the user and operator experience of using OpenStack and
improving our own experience of making it.

Doug