Open Stack

Hi Openstack App-devs,

I would like to give my 2 cents on this topic. First of all: congratulations 
to the authors of the report on a job very well done. I also intentionally 
do not reply to the most recent message in this thread - as it soon turned 
into debugging libcloud, kind of.

If your target audience is enterprise developers - AWS and Azure are 
currently hard to beat: both have good/excellent documentation, AWS has a 
nice Java Eclipse plugin (deployment to AWS is just one button away), Azure 
has very nice integration with the (also very good) MS development tools. 
Both also have the advantage of being just one: there is just one AWS, these 
is just one Azure. There are many Openstacks.
If your target audience is students - AWS and Azure are enticing them as 
well: MS used to have huge discounts for students and schools to the point 
of being almost free, Java is thought all over the place and the Eclipse 
integration and 1 year free tier on AWS provide for a very nice grace period 
in having students getting used to working with AWS. Again, both have the 
advantage of being one - there are many Openstacks.

Anyone wanting to learn Openstack has to decide which Openstack to use and 
which SDK to use - libcloud, Python SDK, direct Openstack API, Openstack CLI 
clients.
That by itself is a big effort - for enterprise developers (time pressure), 
for students (financial limitations - 50USD per month is still a lot to many 
students), for small shop developers (such as myself). Many free or 
affordable cloud-providers have serious limitations on what you can do in 
their free tier (understandable) - sure you can launch a VM, but that is 
hardly a cloud. What if I want to experiment with 15 VMs, it very soon 
becomes a costly experiment.

As I said on the App-dev mailing list about 2 months ago, I am busy writing 
my own first cloud-app on Openstack - so far my only result is to have a 
stable running local Openstack deployment (on 11 VirtualBox VMs on a heavy 
duty desktop machine) using a free download from a commercial Openstack 
service provider. Experiments using osbash, devstack or a container-based 
free download from another commercial provider failed. I have a yaml heat 
template to launch a VM with a public IP address from Horizon and the CLI 
clients can access my local Openstack from another machine. Starting to use 
Openstack is hard. Mu first stab at my app will likely be a heat template 
and/or shell script for a number of the CLI clients.

Kind regards,
Bart

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Stefano Maffulli" <stefano at openstack.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2016 12:43 AM
To: <user-committee at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [User-committee] app dev on-boarding experience report

> On 01/12/2016 11:26 AM, Bruno Morel wrote:
>> Am I wrong in thinking that it all comes down to the libraries
>> compatibilities / coverage ?
>
> that's what I thought for a while but it's not the full picture.
> OpenStack implementations offer hundreds of configuration options and
> the possible permutations of those will affect how a cloud behaves,
> therefore affecting life of a developer. The recent debate around the
> tests that require booting Linux as a VM is a magnifying glass over the
> issue: all OpenStack clouds behave slightly differently, even when they
> run the same code and their front-facing APIs are the same.
>
>> Lib cloud doesn’t support Neutron, pkgcloud does, etc…
>
> I'd like to clarify that apache libcloud *does* support Neutron, in its
> openstack driver... What you read in the report is the feedback that
> Rackspace helpdesk gave to Marcela, who was using the *rackspace* driver
> of libcloud... which apparently lags behind Rackspace's product (I have
> not investigated though, I may be wrong.) What I know is that libcloud
> *openstack* driver works well with defunct-HPCloud, RAX and DreamHost,
> both using neutron.
>
> That said, it is very true that some libraries/SDKs are better
> maintained than others and give better experience. For example,
> OpenStacks' own Shade sdk is *a lot* (like, thousand++ times) better
> than Apache Libcloud when it comes to OpenStack. But Shade doesn't
> support Digital Ocean or AWS or $PROVIDERn, so some developers may not
> be interested in using it.
>
>> As I am myself working on an Objective-C one (yeah I know it’s not
>> very useful, but it allows me to dig down into the APIs and their
>> inconsistencies and it’s a fun project :P),I share Stefano’s pain [1]
>> through and through (and I’ve just finished Keystone V2 and V3
>> support and started Nova..:()
>
> That sounds cool: a native Mac OS client at the horizon? :)
>
>> Maybe we should regroup with Defcore AND the Api workgroup and try to
>> share our discoveries and next action items. I fear all those groups
>> are trying to target the same ultimate aim (consistency for the
>> application developer), but go in slightly different direction…?
>
> Definitely it's a start to admit that app developers have problems that
> are not being addressed... I'd love to hear DefCore's opinion.
>
> /stef
>
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