Open Stack

On Sep 24, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 18/09/14 14:53, Monty Taylor wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> I've recently been thinking a lot about Sean's Layers stuff. So I wrote
>> a blog post which Jim Blair and Devananda were kind enough to help me edit.
>> 
>> http://inaugust.com/post/108
> 
> I think there are a number of unjustified assumptions behind this arrangement of things. I'm going to list some here, but I don't want anyone to interpret this as a personal criticism of Monty. The point is that we all suffer from biases - not for any questionable reasons but purely as a result of our own experiences, who we spend our time talking to and what we spend our time thinking about - and therefore we should all be extremely circumspect about trying to bake our own mental models of what OpenStack should be into the organisational structure of the project itself.

I think there were some assumptions that lead to the Layer1 model. Perhaps a little insight into the in-person debate[1] at OpenStack-SV might help explain where monty was coming from.

The initial thought was a radical idea (pioneered by Jay) to completely dismantle the integrated release and have all projects release independently and functionally test against their real dependencies. This gained support from various people and I still think it is a great long-term goal.

The worry that Monty (and others) had are two-fold:

1. When we had no co-gating in the past, we ended up with a lot of cross-project breakage. If we jump right into this we could end up in the wild west were different projects expect different keystone versions and there is no way to deploy a functional cloud.
2. We have set expectations in our community (and especially with distributions), that we release a set of things that all work together. It is not acceptable for us to just pull the rug out from under them.

These concerns show that we must (in the short term) provide some kind of integrated testing and release. I see the layer1 model as a stepping stone towards the long term goal of having the projects release independently and depend on stable interfaces. We aren’t going to get there immediately, so having a smaller, integrated set of services representing our most common use case seems like a good first step. As our interfaces get more stable and our testing gets better it could move to a (once every X months) release that just packages the current version of the layer1 projects or even be completely managed by distributions.

We need a way to move forward, but I’m hoping we can do it without a concept of “specialness” around layer1 projects. I actually see it as a limitation of these projects that we have to take this stepping stone and cannot disaggregate completely. Instead it should be seen as a necessary evil so that we don’t break our users.

In addition, we should encourage other shared use cases in openstack both for testing (functional tests against groups of services) and for releases (shared releases of related projects).

[1] Note this wasn’t a planned debate, but a spontaneous discussion that included (at various points) Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Joe Gordon, John Dickenson, Myself, and (undoubtedly) one or two people I”m forgetting.
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