Open Stack

Thanks to all of those who attended the midcycle. We had more than 20 
attendees this cycle and excellent participation -- also some new faces!

My apologies for the Google Hangouts failure. We ended up switching to 
Webex for the audio/video conferencing and it scaled significantly 
better. I expect that we'll be using Webex for future meetups as well so 
if you have technical difficulties related to Webex, please try to get 
them fixed or seek help from the rest of us. It *is* possible to get 
webex to run on Linux but it's somewhat more complex.

Since we did not have a dedicated note taker there are no minutes for 
the meetup, but I'll summarize what I consider to be the highlights:

Migration - Rodrigo (ganso) has done a great job of driving this 
forward. The current patchset is based on share instances (a new concept 
we decided to introduce earlier in the release to benefit both migration 
and replication) and is ready for review. The feature will be considered 
experimental in Liberty at best, due to some remaining unsolved 
problems: 1) Share servers with segmented network interfaces can't be 
directly mounted -- we need a new admin-facing network patch to support 
this. 2) Data copy is done in the manager service and needs to be moved 
to a data copy service for better scalability. 3) Generic driver needs 
some work before it can support migrations.

Availability Zones - This was a feature which was proposed after 
Vancouver. The design in Manila is largely inherited from Cinder, but 
improvements have been made by Igor (u_glide). These are done and ready 
to merge. AZs will benefit share replication and also give end users 
control of the locality of their data w.r.t. consumers of the data 
(compute instances).

Replication - I presented the current thinking on replication, which is 
a significant deviation from what I presented in Vancouver. The changes 
are all related to the significantly better user experience offered by 
AZ support, and better implementation made possible by share instances. 
There is a new API proposal, changes to the DB schema, and a draft 
proposal for the driver interface. Work is proceeding on replication but 
won't be mergeable until after the feature freeze so the plan is to land 
the feature first thing in Mitaka.

Manila CI - We discussed the state of vendor CI, reiterating the 
deadlines and offers for help. Andrew (akerr) presented how NetApp 
implements their 3rd party CI system while Silvan (kaisers) presented an 
alternative CI system called sos-ci written by Duncan (DuncanT) and John 
(jgriffith).

Minimum Required Features - The key topic was snapshots and how vendors 
support them. We decided to relax the requirement that all drivers 
support the current snapshot API and to instead make the existing 
snapshot API an optional feature in Liberty. This change was essential 
to avoid needlessly removing several Manila drivers that implement the 
API except for snapshots. We agreed to look at possible alternative 
snapshot APIs in the future for snapshots that have different semantics, 
including a possible revert-share-to-snapshot API and an API to directly 
export snapshots as read-only shares (in Mitaka).

Tempest - Marc (mkoderer) gave an update on how the Tempest project is 
evolving and now Manila can continue to use it for functional/scenario 
tests.

Manauls - I declared that Liberty is the release where Manila will be 
included in the OpenStack manuals (docs.openstack.org). Help will be 
needed from the whole core team and others invested in the success of 
Manila to meet this goal by the Liberty release.

API Microversions - Clinton (cknight) presented an example of the new 
cross-project proposal for finer-grained versioning and described how 
easy it will be to add this enhancement to Manila and how it will free 
us up from having to make difficult API-compatibility decisions in the 
future as we enhance the Manila API.

Versioned Objects - Chen (chen12) gave an update on this topic from 
Vancouver and we agreed that it's a valuable feature to keep our eyes 
on, but not something we want to aim for getting in to Liberty. The 
existing nova work is not something we can borrow directly and the 
Cinder work is ongoing. The team agreed that it would be better to see 
how it turns out in Cinder before we copy the idea.

Driver Private Data - Igor (u_glide) presented this great enhancement 
for drivers mostly to raise awareness of the cool driver features that 
it enables. It was also suggested that this would be a great feature to 
backport to Cinder.

Common Capabilities - We discussed how some very simple 
capabilities/extra specs are already starting to have multiple 
conflicting/confusing names and implementations and how we need to a 
decision making process to enforce conformity for capabilities where 
compatible implementations are possible. We agreed that the common 
capabilities need to be written down in the dev docs and that thin/thick 
provisioning and dedupe support will be the first "common" capabilities. 
Common capabilities will be prefixed with "manila_" to communicate to 
deployers that they are official.

Consistency Groups - Alex (ameade) presented an updated proposal for 
cgroups based on Xing's (xyang) proposal in Vancouver. There was some 
disagreement about the details but a lengthy discussion helped many 
understand the feature better. Alex plans to deliver this feature in 
Liberty so make sure to review it and provide feedback if cgroups are 
interesting to you.


Hopefully I didn't forget anything important, please reply to the thread 
if I left out a topic!

-Ben Swartzlander