Open Stack

Thanks for your comments Gordon. I appreciate where you are coming from
and I think we are actually in agreement on a lot of things.

I just want to make it clear that from the very beginning of the project
the team has tried to communicate (but perhaps could have done a better
job at it) that we aren’t trying to displace other messaging systems that
are clearly delivering a lot of value today.

In fact, I personally have long been a proponent of using the best tool
for the job. The Zaqar project was kicked off at an unconference session
several summits ago because the community saw a need that was not covered
by other messaging systems. Does that mean those other systems are “bad”
or “wrong”? Of course not. It simply means that there are some cases where
those other systems aren’t the best tool for the job, and another tool is
needed (and vice versa).

Does that other tool look *exactly* like Zaqar? Probably not. But a lot of
people have told us Zaqar--in its current form--already delivers a lot of
value that they can’t get from other messaging systems that are available
to them. Zaqar, like any open source project, is a manifestation of lots
of peoples' ideas, and will evolve over time to meet the needs of the
community. 

Does a Qpid/Rabbit/Kafka provisioning service make sense? Probably. Would
such a service totally overlap in terms of use-cases with Zaqar? Community
feedback suggests otherwise. Will there be some other kind of thing that
comes out of the woodwork? Possibly. (Heck, if something better comes
along I for one have no qualms in shifting resources to the more elegant
solution--again, use the best tool for the job.) This process happens all
the time in the broader open-source world. But this process takes a
healthy amount of time, plus broad exposure and usage, which is something
that you simply don’t get as a non-integrated project in the OpenStack
ecosystem.

In any case, it’s pretty clear to me that Zaqar graduating should not be
viewed as making it "the officially blessed messaging service for the
cloud” and nobody is allowed to have any other ideas, ever. If that
happens, it’s only a symptom of a deeper perception/process problem that
is far from unique to Zaqar. In fact, I think it touches on all
non-integrated projects, and many integrated ones as well.

--Kurt

On 9/4/14, 12:38 PM, "Gordon Sim" <gsim at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>This is not intended as criticism of Zaqar in anyway. In my opinion,
>'reinvention' is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just another way of
>saying innovative approach and/or original thinking, both of which are
>good and both of which I think are important in the context of
>communicating in the cloud.