Open Stack

On 02/18/2015 05:09 PM, Chris C. Kemp wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
>  
> 
> I've been thinking more about the conversation many of us had at the
> Paris Summit around the best way to help advance the Application
> Ecosystem working Group, and in particular the idea of a standard
> OpenStack "Sample Application.”
> 
>  
> 
> Many of you are aware of the Java J2EE "Pet Store" sample application,
> or the .NET "IBuySpy Portal" sample application.   These applications
> were used to demonstrate the core capabilities of these platforms, and
> served to illustrate the typical design decisions and tradeoffs
> developers make when building applications for these platforms.
>   Running an application on OpenStack presents a number of opportunities
> and challenges to those that may be otherwise familiar with running
> applications on traditional virtualized infrastructure, or are
> accustomed to some of the features in various public cloud platforms.
> 
>  
> 
> I, as well as Bill Franklin, have been socializing this idea with some
> of our peers here in Silicon Valley, and there seems to be a lot of
> interest in the idea of developing a sample application for OpenStack.  
> The application could be itself an OpenStack project, and could have a
> set of community defined requirements such as "must use OpenStack core
> capabilities" and could be used to demonstrate portability between
> different OpenStack implementations.  Furthermore, just as code from
> PetStore found itself into thousands of applications, this application
> could serve as a fantastic starting point for developers that are
> building next generation applications targeting the OpenStack platform.
> 
>  
> 
> If there was enough interest, we wanted to propose that we bring folks
> interested together to collaboratively develop a set of "core
> requirements" for the application.  We could then perhaps work with the
> Foundation to crowdsource a "concept" for the application (It's 2015, I
> think the OpenStack Community can do better than a Pet Store, or a Spy
> Shop, right?).  We could, with sufficient interest and sponsorship, have
> a hackathon around the Vancouver Summit to build the first prototype.  I
> know there are a few folks from Nebula, HP and other companies that
> would love to chip in.   Please let me know what you think here on the
> mailing list, and if there is enough interest we can schedule an online
> discussion to discuss further.

Given that the existing OpenStack Infra effort runs across 2 OpenStack
Clouds, it might be interesting to see if there are either lessons
learned, or a subset that could be used at the example application. The
application being a Development Pipeline (given that dev/test is one of
the workloads that often comes up).

The upside being that it already exists, does a set of what you want,
and any improvements to the effort to use OpenStack better would also be
a virtuous cycle to the OpenStack development effort.

The downside is that it already exists, so there is a lot of legacy and
bits to understand. And it's organically grown in place, so may not have
the crispness expected for this effort.

So I don't want to suggest it's a slam dunk by any means, and at the end
of the day might not be a reasonable fit, but it seems like data that
should be on the table some where shaping what the final sample
application looks like.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net