[openstack-dev] [all][tc][glance] Glance needs help, it's getting critical

Erno Kuvaja ekuvaja at redhat.com
Mon Jun 12 15:55:43 UTC 2017


Just quick comment here on my day off. I will get proper reply to the
chain itself tomorrow when I'm back.

While I cannot argue with all Mike's points below, I personally cannot
stand behind his proposals here and just want to indicate that this is
view of one member, not the Glance community by wide.

- Erno "Jokke" Kuvaja

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 2:56 PM, Mikhail Fedosin <mfedosin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Flavio raised a very difficult and important question, and I think that we,
> as community members, should decide what to do with Glance next.
>
> I will try to state my subjective opinion. I was involved in the Glance
> project for almost three years and studied it fairly plank. I believe that
> the main problem is that the project was designed extremely poorly. Glance
> does not have many tasks to solve, but nevertheless, there are a lot of Java
> design patterns used (factory of factories, visitors, proxy and other things
> that are unnecessary in this case). All this leads to absolutely sad
> consequences, when in order to add an image tag over 180 objects of
> different classes are created, the code execution passes through more than
> 25 locations with a number of callbacks 3 times. So I can say that the code
> base is artificially over-complicated and incredibly inflated.
>
> The next problem is that over the years the code has grown by a number of
> workarounds, which make it difficult to implement new changes - any change
> leads to something breaking down somewhere else. In the long run, we get a
> lot of pain associated with race conditions, hard-to-recover heisenbugs and
> other horrors of programmer's life. It is difficult to talk about attracting
> new developers, because the developing of the code in such conditions is
> mentally exhausting.
>
> We can continue to deny the obvious, saying that Glance simply needs people
> and everything will be wonderful. But unfortunately this is not so - we
> should admit that it is simply not profitable to engage in further
> development. I suggest thinking about moving the current code base into a
> support mode and starting to develop an alternative (which I have been doing
> for the past year and a half).
>
> If you are allergic to the word "artifacts", do not read the following
> paragraph:
>
> We are actively developing the Glare project, which offers a universal
> catalog of various binary data along with its metadata - at the moment the
> catalog supports the storage of images of virtual machines and has feature
> parity with Glance. The service is used in production by Nokia, and it was
> thoroughly tested at various settings. Next week we plan to release the
> first stable version and begin the integration with various projects of
> OpenStack: Mistral and Vitrage in the first place.
>
> As a solution, I can propose to implement an additional API to Glare, which
> would correspond to OpenStack Image API v2 and test that OpenStack is able
> to work on its basis. After that, leave Glance at rest and start developing
> Glare as a universal catalog of binary data for OpenStack.
>
> Best,
> Mike
>
> On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Flavio Percoco <flavio at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> (sorry if duplicate, having troubles with email)
>>
>> Hi Team,
>>
>> I've been working a bit with the Glance team and trying to help where I
>> can and
>> I can't but be worried about the critical status of the Glance team.
>> Unfortunately, the number of participants in the Glance team has been
>> reduced a
>> lot resulting in the project not being able to keep up with the goals, the
>> reviews required, etc.[0]
>>
>> I've always said that Glance is one of those critical projects that not
>> many
>> people notice until it breaks. It's in every OpenStack cloud sitting in a
>> corner
>> and allowing for VMs to be booted. So, before things get even worse, I'd
>> like us to brainstorm a bit on what solutions/options we have now.
>>
>> I know Glance is not the only project "suffering" from lack of
>> contributors but
>> I don't want us to get to the point where there won't be contributors
>> left.
>>
>> How do people feel about adding Glance to the list of "help wanted" areas
>> of
>> interest?
>>
>> Would it be possible to get help w/ reviews from folks from teams like
>> nova/cinder/keystone? Any help is welcomed, of course, but I'm trying to
>> think
>> about teams that may be familiar with the Glance code/api already.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Flavio
>>
>> [0] http://stackalytics.com/?module=glance-group&metric=marks
>> [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/466684/
>>
>> --
>> @flaper87
>> Flavio Percoco
>>
>>
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>
>
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