<font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace">I have already received quite a few questions about the Lunr project, so I would like to attempt to answer most of them in one post.</font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br>
</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace">* What is it?</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> Lunr is a project to extend and evolve the Volume Services currently in the Nova compute project.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace">* What is happening to introduce the project to the Openstack community? Are we able to discuss this at next week's design summit?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> We are working on getting the following done before the design summit next week:</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Choose a project name - DONE (Lunr)</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Identify a project lead - DONE (Chuck Thier @creiht)</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Set up a project repository</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Introduce the project to the Openstack mailing list - DONE</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Begin Openstack Volume API discussion on the mailing list - Coming soon!</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Create a blueprint signaling the intention of building this service - DONE</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Schedule blueprint for discussion at the next design summit - DONE</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Is this an open project? How does it work with other Openstack projects?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> The Lunr project will be developed as an opensource project and involve the Openstack community. Initially it is proposed as an incubated Openstack project. The Lunr project plans on adopting the common services required (such as authn/authz) when they are available. The Lunr API will be able to be consumed by Nova and any other Openstack project that needs to provision and manage block storage volumes.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * What is the release schedule for this project?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> We are working on having a deployable service in the Diablo release timeframe that will work with Nova.</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br>
</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * How does this relate to the existing volume manager?</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> The current volume manager in Nova will continue to exist. Lunr will be an "optional" volume service, similar in a way to how the Network as a Service project will be developing.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * I'm vendor X and would like to ensure that my storage system works with Openstack and/or contribute. How do I do this?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> There is great interest from many vendors in working with Lunr. At the base level, we will be adopting a very similar (if not the same) driver approach that is currently in the Nova volume service. This will provide a simple interface for storage providers to integrate their storage products into Lunr. If you are interested, please participate in the community discussion around the API and development of the system, and if you can, come to the next developer summit and talk with us.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> * Are we throwing away perfectly good Nova volume manager code? Why do a separate project rather than extending the current implementation?</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> The existing Nova volume manager will continue to exist, with Lunr extending and evolving the future of block storage for in Openstack. We will re-use code and ideas from the Nova volume manager where it makes sense. Having a volume manager that is independent of Nova, while allowing Nova and other services to consume the volume services through a defined API, is a design pattern that is consistent with other Openstack services (for example Glance and Networks)</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"> Moving forward, the Openstack block storage system needs to evolve to allow for true enterprise and service provider functionality; such as mixed storage targets, tiered storage targets, QOS scheduling, and many other aspects of block storage management for private and public clouds. The most efficient manner for the Openstack community to accomplish this is to separate the concerns of volume management from compute orchestration.</font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace"><br></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace">--</font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'courier new', monospace">Chuck Thier (@creiht)</font></div>