Open Stack

On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 08:51 -0700, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have seen lots of discussions on blogs and twitter heating up around
> Amazon API compatibility and OpenStack. This seems like a recurring
> topic, often raised by pundits and recently joined by members of the
> community. I think it's time to bring the discussions inside our
> community to our established channels and processes. Our community has
> established ways to discuss and take technical decisions, from the more
> accessible General mailing list to the Development list to the Design
> Summits, the weekly project meetings, the reviews on gerrit and the
> governing bodies Technical Committee and Board of Directors.
> 
> While we have not seen a large push in the community recently via
> contributions or deployments, Amazon APIs have been an option for
> deployments from the early days of OpenStack.
> 
> I would like to have this discussion inside the established channels of
> our community and get the opinions from those that maintain that
> OpenStack should increase efforts for Amazon APIs compatibility, and
> ultimately it would be good to see code contributions.
> 
> Do you think OpenStack should have an ongoing effort to imitate Amazon's
> API? If you think it should, how would you lead the effort?

I think AWS compatible APIs for any of our services is a great feature.
I'd love to tell people they can try out OpenStack by pointing their
existing AWS based deployment tools at an OpenStack cloud.

Just yesterday, I saw a comment on IRC along the lines of "wow, Nova has
an EC2 API ... I should totally try out using knife with that".

Two things seem straightforward and obvious to me - our primary API is
the OpenStack "native" APIs and, yet, any built-in AWS compatibility we
can get is mucho goodness.

That said, it's not "AWS compat == goodness" statements we need ... we
need people who are keen to contribute to the work.

However, the very least we should do is make it clear that if anyone
*does* step up and do that work, that we'll welcome the contributions
with open arms.

Cheers,
Mark.