[openstack-dev] [tc][ceilometer] Some background on the gnocchi project

Sandy Walsh sandy.walsh at RACKSPACE.COM
Mon Aug 11 19:47:42 UTC 2014


On 8/11/2014 4:22 PM, Eoghan Glynn wrote:
>
>> Hi Eoghan,
>>
>> Thanks for the note below. However, one thing the overview below does not
>> cover is why InfluxDB ( http://influxdb.com/ ) is not being leveraged. Many
>> folks feel that this technology is a viable solution for the problem space
>> discussed below.
> Great question Brad!
>
> As it happens we've been working closely with Paul Dix (lead
> developer of InfluxDB) to ensure that this metrics store would be
> usable as a backend driver. That conversation actually kicked off
> at the Juno summit in Atlanta, but it really got off the ground
> at our mid-cycle meet-up in Paris on in early July.
...
>
> The InfluxDB folks have committed to implementing those features in
> over July and August, and have made concrete progress on that score.
>
> I hope that provides enough detail to answer to your question?

I guess it begs the question, if influxdb will do what you want and it's
open source (MIT) as well as commercially supported, how does gnocchi
differentiate?

> Cheers,
> Eoghan
>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Brad
>>
>>
>> Brad Topol, Ph.D.
>> IBM Distinguished Engineer
>> OpenStack
>> (919) 543-0646
>> Internet: btopol at us.ibm.com
>> Assistant: Kendra Witherspoon (919) 254-0680
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Eoghan Glynn <eglynn at redhat.com>
>> To: "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)"
>> <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>,
>> Date: 08/06/2014 11:17 AM
>> Subject: [openstack-dev] [tc][ceilometer] Some background on the gnocchi
>> project
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Folks,
>>
>> It's come to our attention that some key individuals are not
>> fully up-to-date on gnocchi activities, so it being a good and
>> healthy thing to ensure we're as communicative as possible about
>> our roadmap, I've provided a high-level overview here of our
>> thinking. This is intended as a precursor to further discussion
>> with the TC.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Eoghan
>>
>>
>> What gnocchi is:
>> ===============
>>
>> Gnocchi is a separate, but related, project spun up on stackforge
>> by Julien Danjou, with the objective of providing efficient
>> storage and retrieval of timeseries-oriented data and resource
>> representations.
>>
>> The goal is to experiment with a potential approach to addressing
>> an architectural misstep made in the very earliest days of
>> ceilometer, specifically the decision to store snapshots of some
>> resource metadata alongside each metric datapoint. The core idea
>> is to move to storing datapoints shorn of metadata, and instead
>> allow the resource-state timeline to be reconstructed more cheaply
>> from much less frequently occurring events (e.g. instance resizes
>> or migrations).
>>
>>
>> What gnocchi isn't:
>> ==================
>>
>> Gnocchi is not a large-scale under-the-radar rewrite of a core
>> OpenStack component along the lines of keystone-lite.
>>
>> The change is concentrated on the final data-storage phase of
>> the ceilometer pipeline, so will have little initial impact on the
>> data-acquiring agents, or on transformation phase.
>>
>> We've been totally open at the Atlanta summit and other forums
>> about this approach being a multi-cycle effort.
>>
>>
>> Why we decided to do it this way:
>> ================================
>>
>> The intent behind spinning up a separate project on stackforge
>> was to allow the work progress at arms-length from ceilometer,
>> allowing normalcy to be maintained on the core project and a
>> rapid rate of innovation on gnocchi.
>>
>> Note that that the developers primarily contributing to gnocchi
>> represent a cross-section of the core team, and there's a regular
>> feedback loop in the form of a recurring agenda item at the
>> weekly team meeting to avoid the effort becoming silo'd.
>>
>>
>> But isn't re-architecting frowned upon?
>> ======================================
>>
>> Well, the architecture of other OpenStack projects have also
>> under-gone change as the community understanding of the
>> implications of prior design decisions has evolved.
>>
>> Take for example the move towards nova no-db-compute & the
>> unified-object-model in order to address issues in the nova
>> architecture that made progress towards rolling upgrades
>> unneccessarily difficult.
>>
>> The point, in my understanding, is not to avoid doing the
>> course-correction where it's deemed necessary. Rather, the
>> principle is more that these corrections happen in an open
>> and planned way.
>>
>>
>> The path forward:
>> ================
>>
>> A subset of the ceilometer community will continue to work on
>> gnocchi in parallel with the ceilometer core over the remainder
>> of the Juno cycle and into the Kilo timeframe. The goal is to
>> have an initial implementation of gnocchi ready for tech preview
>> by the end of Juno, and to have the integration/migration/
>> co-existence questions addressed in Kilo.
>>
>> Moving the ceilometer core to using gnocchi will be contingent
>> on it demonstrating the required performance characteristics and
>> providing the semantics needed to support a v3 ceilometer API
>> that's fit-for-purpose.
>>
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