Open Stack

On Tue, 2015-03-03 at 17:30 -0500, James Slagle wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Don't let the subject throw you off :)
> 
> I wasn't sure how to phrase what I wanted to capture in this mail, and
> that seemed reasonable enough. I wanted to kick off a discussion about
> what gaps people think are missing from TripleO before we can meet the
> goal of realistically being able to use TripleO in production.
> 
> The things in my mind are:
> 
> Upgrades - I believe the community is trending away from the image
> based upgrade rebuild process. The ongoing Puppet integration work is
> integrated with Heat's SoftwareConfig/SoftwareDeployment features and
> is package driven. There is still work to be done, especially around
> supporting rollbacks, but I think this could be part of the answer to
> how the upgrade problem gets solved.

+1 Using packages solves some problems very nicely. We haven't solved
all the CI related issues around using packages with upstream but it is
getting better. I mention this because it would be nice to have CI
testing on the upgrade process automated at some point...

> 
> HA - We have an implementation of HA in tripleo-image-elements today.
> However, the Puppet codepath leaves that mostly unused. The Puppet
> modules however do support HA. Is that the answer here as well?

In general most of the puppet modules support the required HA bits. We
are still working to integrate some of the final pieces here but in
general I expect this to proceed quickly.

> 
> CLI - We have devtest. I'm not sure if anyone would argue that should
> be used in production. It could be...but I don't think that was it's
> original goal and it shows. The downstreams of TripleO that I'm aware
> of each ended up more of less having their own CLI tooling. Obviously
> I'm only very familiar with one of the downstreams, but in some
> instances I believe parts of devtest were reused, and other times not.
> That begs the question, do we need a well represented unified CLI in
> TripleO? We have a pretty good story about using Nova/Ironic/Heat[0]
> to deploy OpenStack, and devtest is one such implementation of that
> story. Perhaps we need something more production oriented.

I think this is an interesting idea and perhaps has some merit. I'd like
to see some specific examples showing how the unified CLI might make
things easier for end users...

> 
> Baremetal management - To what extent should TripleO venture into this
> space? I'm thinking things like discovery/introspection, ready state,
> and role assignment. Ironic is growing features to expose things like
> RAID management via vendor passthrough API's. Should TripleO take a
> role in exercising those API's? It's something that could be built
> into the flow of the unified CLI if we were to end up going that
> route.
> 
> Bootstrapping - The undercloud needs to be
> bootstrapped/deployed/installed itself. We have the seed vm to do
> that. I've also worked on an implementation to install an undercloud
> via an installation script assuming the base OS is already installed.
> Are these the only 2 options we should consider, or are there other
> ideas that will integrate better into existing infrastructure?

And also should we think about possibly renaming these? I find that many
times when talking about TripleO to someone new they find the whole
undercloud/overcloud thing confusing. Calling the undercloud the
"baremetal cloud" makes it click.

> 
> Release Cadence with wider OpenStack - I'd love to be able to say on
> the day that a new release of OpenStack goes live that you can use
> TripleO to deploy that release in production...and here's how you'd do
> it....
> 
> What other items should we include here? I almost added a point for
> Stability, but let's just assume we want to make everything as stable
> as we possibly can :).
> 
> I know I've mostly raised questions. I have some of my own answers in
> mind. But, I was actually hoping to get others talking about what the
> right answers might be.
> 
> [0] Plus the other supporting cast of characters: Keystone/Glance/Neutron/Swift.
> 
> Thanks.
>