Open Stack

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Kurt Griffiths
<kurt.griffiths at rackspace.com> wrote:
[snip]
> 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.

While that is de rigueur today, it's actually at the core of the
current problem space. Blessing a project by integrating it is not a
scalable long-term solution. We don't have a model to integrate >1
project for the same space // of the same type, or to bless the
stability of a non-integrated project. You won't see two messaging
services, or two compute services, in the integrated release. In fact,
integration is supposed to occur only *after* the community has sorted
out "a winner" within a given space. In my view, it should also happen
only after the community has proven a project to be stable and
scalable in production.

It should be self-evident that, for a large and healthy ecosystem of
production-quality projects to be created and flourish, we can not
pick a winner and shut down competition by integrating a project
*prior* to that project getting "broad exposure and usage". A practice
of integrating projects merely to get them exposure and contributors
is self-defeating.


> 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”

That's exactly what graduation does, though. Your statement in the
previous paragraph - that non-integrated projects don't get adoption -
only furthers this point.

> and nobody is allowed to have any other ideas, ever.

Of course other people can have other ideas -- but we don't have a
precedent for handling it inside the community. Look at Ceilometer -
there are at least two other projects which attempted to fill that
space, but we haven't any means to accept them into OpenStack without
either removing Ceilometer or encouraging those projects to merge into
Ceilometer.

> 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.
>

Yup.

I agree that we shouldn't hold Zaqar hostage while the community sorts
out the small-tent-big-camp questions. But I also feel like we _must_
sort that out soon, because the current system (integrate all the
things!) doesn't appear to be sustainable for much longer.


-Devananda