Open Stack

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:04 AM, David Kranz <dkranz at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 02/24/2015 09:37 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 24 Feb 2015, Sean Dague wrote:
>>
>>  That also provides a very concrete answer to "will people show up".
>>> Because if they do, and we get this horizontal refactoring happening,
>>> then we get to the point of being able to change release cadences
>>> faster. If they don't, we remain with the existing system. Vs changing
>>> the system and hoping someone is going to run in and backfill the breaks.
>>>
>>
>> Isn't this the way of the world? People only put halon in the
>> machine room after the fire.
>>
>> I agree that "people showing up" is a real concern, but I also think
>> that we shy away too much from the productive energy of stuff
>> breaking. It's the breakage that shows where stuff isn't good
>> enough.
>>
>> [Flavio said]:
>>
>>> To this I'd also add that bug fixing is way easier when you have
>>> aligned releases for projects that are expected to be deployed
>>> together. It's easier to know what the impact of a change/bug is
>>> throughout the infrastructure.
>>>
>>
>> Can't this be interpreted as an excuse for making software which
>> does not have a low surface area and a good API?
>>
>> (Note I'm taking a relatively unrealistic position for sake of
>> conversation.)
>>
> I'm not so sure about that. IMO, much of this goes back to the question of
> whether OpenStack services are APIs or implementations. This was debated
> with much heat at the Diablo summit (Hi Jay). I frequently have
> conversations where there is an issue about release X vs Y when it is
> really about api versions. Even if we say that we are about implementations
> as well as apis, we can start to organize our processes and code as if we
> were just apis. If each service had a well-defined, versioned,
> discoverable, well-tested api, then projects could follow their own release
> schedule, relying on distros or integrators to put the pieces together and
> verify the quality of the whole stack to the users. Such entities could
> still collaborate on that task, and still identify longer release cycles,
> using "stable branches". The upstream project could still test the latest
> released versions together. Some of these steps are now being taken to
> resolve gate issues and horizontal resource issues. Doing this would vastly
> increase agility but with some costs:
>
> 1. The upstream project would likely have to give up on the worthy goal of
> providing an actual deployable stack that could be used as an alternative
> to AWS, etc. That saddens me, but for various reasons, including that we do
> no scale/performance testing on the upstream code, we are not achieving
> that goal anyway. The big tent proposals are also a move away from that
> goal.
>
> 2. We would have to give up on incompatible api changes. But with the
> replacement of nova v3 with microversions we are already doing that.
> Massive adoption with release agility is simply incompatible with allowing
> incompatible api changes.
>
> Most of this is just echoing what Jay said. I think this is the way any
> SOA would be designed. If we did this, and projects released frequently,
> would there be a reason for any one to be chasing master?
>
>  -David
>
>
>
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​Seems like some of the proposals around frequency (increasing in
particular) just sort of move the bottlenecks around.  Honestly, I thought
we were already on a path with some of the ideas that Sean and David (and
indirectly Jay) proposed.  Get rid of the whole "coordinated release"
altogether.  I think there should still be some sort of tagging or
something at some interval that just says "here's a point in time
collection that we call X".

Another proposal I think I've talked to some folks about is a true CI/Train
model.  Cut out some of the artificial milestone deadlines etc, just keep
rolling and what's ready at the release point is what's ready; you make a
cut of what's there at that time and roll on.  Basically eliminate the
feature freeze and other components and "hopefully" keep feature commit
distributed.  There are certainly all sorts of gotchas here, but I don't
think it's very interesting to most so I won't go into a bunch of theory on
it.

Regardless, I do think that no matter the direction we all seem to be of
the opinion that we need to move more towards projects being responsible
for more of the horizontal functions (as Sean put it).  Personally I think
this is a great direction for a number of reasons, and I also think that it
might force us to be better about our API's and requirements than we have
been in the past.
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