[tc][telemetry][gnocchi] The future of Gnocchi in OpenStack

Adrian Turjak adriant at catalystcloud.nz
Fri Aug 28 12:36:31 UTC 2020


Hey OpenStackers,

We're currently in the process of discussing what to do with OpenStack's 
reliance on Gnocchi, and at present it is looking like we are most 
likely to just fork it back under a new name (currently Farfalle to 
stick with the pasta theme).

The discussion is mostly happening here:
https://review.opendev.org/#/c/744592/

But for those running Gnocchi in prod, this is likely something you may 
want to know about and we'd like to hear from you.

A bit of history: Gnocchi started off as a new backend for Ceilometer in 
OpenStack, and eventually become the defacto API for telemetry samples 
when that was removed from Ceilometer (as backed by MongoDB). Gnocchi 
was eventually spun off outside of OpenStack, but still essentially 
remained our API for telemetry despite not being an official part of 
OpenStack anymore. Since then the development around it seems to have 
stalled, with pull requests left unreviewed, CI broken, and even the 
domain for the docs lapsing once.

They have essentially said the project is unmaintained themselves: 
https://github.com/gnocchixyz/gnocchi/issues/1049

Given that OpenStack telemetry relies on it, we needed to decide what to 
do. We tried talking to the devs which spun it off outside of OpenStack, 
but they seem disinclined to interact with the OpenStack community, or 
move the project back to our infra/governance despite OpenStack looking 
like the only consumers of Gnocchi as a project. We want to find a 
solution, and the feeling is that they don't.

So we've opted to fork it back and now the discussion is how to approach 
that fork. The OpenStack community doesn't want to maintain a time 
series database, but our telemetry API is part of it. We are putting it 
under non-OpenStack namespace to start, but we need to decide what the 
long term place for it should be.

Do we want to make it an official project again? Do we keep it just as 
an API and drop the time series DB part for another DB? Do we build a 
new API back into Ceilometer and switch to a different backend like 
InfluxDB? We don't know yet, and we want some input from people who use 
the service so we can hopefully work with OpenStack telemetry as a whole 
and figure out what the long term picture is.

If Gnocchi matters to you at all, or you use it, we want to hear from you.

Cheers,
Adrian Turjak




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