Open Stack

Designate (OpenStack DNSaaS) Workshop - Austin, TX - January 27-29, 2014

hosted by Rackspace

= Development Process Review =

Adrian Otto gave an overview of the Solum development process.  One 
interesting idea is to keep commits posted for review small, under 200 
lines, to ease reviews and encourage more reviewers.  Designate team 
will review commits to see if that is a reasonable size or if larger 
would be ok.  Everyone should spend some time (e.g. an hour per day) to 
review commits.

Overall,  the core interest is making the development process more 
approachable from outsiders, some recommendations that came from this 
discussion are:

* Limit the scope and size of both blueprints are commits.
    This is generally just good engineering practice.
    Makes code-reviews more approachable
    Makes tackling blueprints more approachable without intimate 
knowledge of Designate

* Review in-progress blueprint status during the weekly meeting.
* Document contribution process
    Processes for bugs and blueprints
    How to submit code via Gerrit / Jenkins
* Make use of the openstack-dev mailing list for team discussions where 
appropriate

= Blueprint Review =

Major features for Icehouse are v2 API, Server Pools, and blacklists.  
Some of the new API features are support for the hierarchical nature of 
DNS (zones, pools, servers, records), support for bulk operations, 
support for bulk load of existing BIND files, and different ways to 
support searching (e.g. have a /search? URL or require user to provide 
/zones etc. hierarchy).  Discussed how to support doing transacted updates.

= Mini-DNS =

One of the problems is how to do an N-phase commit over all of the 
backend DNS servers.  The proposed solution is to create a "mini-dns" 
server inside of designate.  Then all designate has to do is send a 
standard DNS NOTIFY request to each backend, and have each backend 
asynchronously initiate a DNS AXFR to get the latest updates.  This 
should support AXFR at first, then IXFR (incremental) to decrease 
latency and bandwidth.  IXFR will depend on the "Review changes and 
Rollback" 
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/designate/+spec/point-in-time-restore-zone 
blueprint.  Existing DNS libraries (e.g. dnspython) and a from scratch 
approach will be reviewed for the Mini-DNS implementation, Mini-DNS will 
not be a full-fledged DNS server.

= Testing =

Right now testing is done in shell via the designate plugin for 
devstack.  Work on a better testing framework is being gated by 
incubation status.  If designate is incubated, it will be easy to use 
openstack tempest.  Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to 
plug-in to tempest.

= Global Load Balancing =

There was a presentation from the Rackspace load balancing team about 
global load balancing and how it might fit in with designate, or with 
some of the other related projects such as Neutron LBaaS and Libra.

= Detailed Minutes =

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/DesignateAustinWorkshop2014-01