Open Stack

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 05:06:31PM -0500, Christopher Armstrong wrote:
> 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

Thanks for sharing, will take a proper look over the next few days!

> 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.

Good to hear! :)

> 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.

As others have mentioned, I'm not clear on this coupling between template
and Autoscaling, it seems like this superset of AS functionality will just
require a new resource/resources to provide the interface, and as
previously discussed, probably an API which allows AS functionality to be
consumed without directly creating a Heat template (we may do that behind
the scenes though..)

If you can provide more details on why you think the HOT design is a
prereq for this AS work, that would be helpful :)

Thanks!

Steve