Open Stack

On 09/04/2014 09:44 PM, Kurt Griffiths wrote:
> 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).

I think communicating that unmet need, those use-cases not best served 
by other systems, would help a lot in clarifying Zaqar's intended role.

> 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.

Indeed, and to be clear, I wasn't really commenting on the graduation at 
all. I was really just responding to the statements on scope and 
differentiation; 'messaging service for the cloud' is a very broad 
problem space and as you rightly point out there may be different tools 
that best serve different parts of that problem space.