Open Stack

Rackspace has recently released its autoscaling system, named Otter, as
open source, and I wanted to mention it here and clarify some points, in
addition to kicking off initial discussion about it.

Here's the short blog post with some useful info:

http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-autoscale-is-now-open-source.html

And the code:

https://github.com/rackerlabs/otter

To be clear up front, this is *not* meant as a competitor to Heat's
autoscaling implementation. The main intent of the open sourcing, in fact,
is so that Heat can easily adapt the API and implementation to its own use,
and eventually have Rackspace use Heat and its autoscaling directly. The
Otter project was started last year, and will be the basis for the first
version of autoscaling at Rackspace. As soon as Autoscale in Heat is ready
(i.e., it has feature parity with Otter), we plan on migrating to Heat.

Of course, since the tech that Otter uses (Cassandra, Twisted) is different
from what Heat uses, it's going to require a lot of retooling. This is
exactly what Thomas Hervé and I are tasked with doing for the foreseeable
future, funded by Rackspace.

I'm very new to Heat and still getting up to speed on the code base, but I
hope to start working on this soon. The high level plan is to create an API
for autoscaling in Heat based on community discussion via the mailing list,
IRC, and Gerrit review queue. We'll use the Otter API as a starting point,
since it already exists, but we'll clearly have to reimplement it using
"native" Heat technologies.

I believe the consensus is that the work on the new HOT format and
underlying design changes is a prerequisite for the autoscaling work that
Thomas and I are to do, so we'll definitely help with that. I'll let
someone with a better understanding chime in about that.

I'm looking forward to collaborating!

-- 
IRC: radix
Christopher Armstrong
Rackspace
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