Open Stack

Greetings, Heat team!
As you may be aware, I've been working with other folks in the community 
on documenting a vision for OpenStack clouds (formerly known as the 
'Technical Vision') - essentially to interpret the mission statement in 
long-form, in a way that we can use to actually help guide decisions. 
You can read the latest draft here: https://review.openstack.org/592205

We're trying to get feedback from as many people as possible - in many 
ways the value is in the process of coming together to figure out what 
we're trying to achieve as a community with OpenStack and how we can 
work together to build it. The document is there to help us remember 
what we decided so we don't have to do it all again over and over.

The vision is structured with two sections that apply broadly to every 
project in OpenStack - describing the principles that we believe are 
essential to every cloud, and the ones that make OpenStack different 
from some other clouds. The third section is a list of design goals that 
we want OpenStack as a whole to be able to meet - ideally each project 
would be contributing toward one or more of these design goals.

I think the most relevant design goal here for Heat is the one on 
Customisable Integration. This definitely has implications for how Heat 
designs things - for example, Heat follows these guidelines with its 
autoscaling implementation, by providing a webhook URL that can be used 
for scaling up and down and allowing users to wire it to either Aodh, 
Monasca, or some other thing (possibly of their own design). But beyond 
that, Heat is the service that actually provides the wiring, not only 
for itself but for all of OpenStack. When users want to connect 
resources from different services together, much of the time they'll be 
doing so using the declarative model of a Heat template.

The sections on Interoperability and Bidirectional Compatibility should 
also be important considerations when making design decisions, since 
Heat templates should help provide interoperability across clouds. The 
Cross-Project Dependencies section is also likely of interest, since 
several projects rely on Heat, and in fact in the distant past the TC 
used to require this, but that is no longer the case either in practice 
or in the document as proposed. Finally, the section on Application 
Control mentions the importance of allowing applications to authenticate 
securely to the cloud, which is something Heat has put a lot of work 
into and run into a lot of problems with. My hope is that this document 
will help to spread that focus further in other parts of OpenStack so 
that this kind of thing gets easier over time.

If you would like me or another TC member to join one of your team IRC 
meetings to discuss further what the vision means for your team, please 
reply to this thread to set it up. You are also welcome to bring up any 
questions in the TC IRC channel, #openstack-tc - there's more of us 
around during Office Hours 
(https://governance.openstack.org/tc/#office-hours), but you can talk to 
us at any time.

Feedback can also happen either in this thread or on the review 
https://review.openstack.org/592205

If the team is generally happy with the vision as it is and doesn't have 
any specific feedback, that's cool but I'd like to request that at least 
the PTL leave a vote on the review. It's important to know whether we 
are actually developing a consensus in the community or just talking to 
ourselves :)

many thanks,
Zane.