Open Stack

Heh, I just got off the phone with Monty talking about this :) Comments 
inline...

On 09/22/2014 03:11 PM, Tim Bell wrote:
> The quality designation is really important for the operator
> community who are trying to work out what we can give to our end
> users.

So, I think it's important to point out here that there are three 
different kinds of operators/deployers:

  * Ones who use a distribution of OpenStack (RDO, UCA, MOS, Nebula, 
Piston, etc)
  * Ones who use Triple-O
  * Ones who go it alone and install (via source, a mixture of source 
and packages, via config management like Chef or Puppet, etc)

In reality, you are referring to the last group, since operators in the 
first group are saying "we are relying on a distribution to make 
informed choices about what is ready for prime time because we tested 
these things together". Operators in the second group are really only HP 
right now, AFAICT, and Triple-O's "opinion" on the production readiness 
of the things it deploys in the undercloud are roughly equal to "all of 
the integrated release that the TC defines".

I personally think that if an operator is choosing to be in the third 
group, then they are taking on the responsibility of testing what they 
deploy in a staging/test environment in order to validate that it meets 
their own requirements. In other words, the onus of determining whether 
something is production ready is on their own shoulders. If the operator 
chose to deploy OpenStack on top of a vanilla/custom Linux distribution 
instead of Red Hat, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, or whatever, we would not complain 
to the Linux kernel community that they have not made quality 
designations available for all the pieces we decided to put in our 
custom Linux distribution. Likewise, I think that is the role of 
OpenStack distributions: the choices and options that the distributor 
makes are a result of testing certain things together and the 
distributor's opinion of quality. If a deployer of OpenStack chooses to 
go it alone and not use an OpenStack distribution, that's totally cool, 
but I don't believe it should be the OpenStack developer community's 
responsibility to vouch for the production readiness of each component 
of OpenStack.

Now, Monty has a big problem with this idea. I know, because he just 
told me he does :) Monty thinks this attitude of relying on OpenStack 
distributions to make choices about production quality of OpenStack 
components leads inevitably to "open core" opportunities, with some 
companies choosing to label a few upstream components as production 
quality and others (the ones the company developed internally) as their 
production quality choices.

I happen to doubt that relying on OpenStack distributions to make these 
choices will lead to open core stuff.

Best,
-jay

> Offering early helps to establish the real-life experience and give
> good feedback on the designs.  However, the operator then risks
> leaving their users orphaned if the project does not get a
> sustainable following or significant disruption if the APIs change.
>
> The packaging teams are key here as well. When do Ubuntu and Red Hat
> work out the chain of pre-reqs etc. to produce installable packages,
> packstack/juju tool support ?
>
> We do need to have some way to show that an layer #2 package is ready
> for prime time production and associated criteria (packages
> available, docs available, >1 company communities, models for HA and
> scale, …)
>
> Tim
>
>
>
>
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