Open Stack

At the summit last week one of the early cross-project sessions
tried to identify some common “themes” or “goals” for the Mitaka
cycle. I proposed the session to talk about some of the areas of
work that all of our teams need to do, but that fall by the wayside
when we don't pull the whole community together to focus attention
on them. We had several ideas proposed, and some lively discussion
about them. The notes are in the etherpad [1], and I will try to
summarize the discussion here.

1. Functional testing, especially of client libraries, came up as
a result of a few embarrassingly broken client releases during
Liberty.  Those issues were found and fixed quickly, but they exposed
a gap in our test coverage.

2. Adding tests useful for DefCore and similar interoperability
testing was suggested in part because of our situation in Glance,
where many of the image-related API tests actually talk to the Nova
API instead of the Glance API. We may have other areas where
additional tests in tempest could eventually find their way into
the DefCore definition, ensuring more interoperability between
deployed OpenStack clouds.

3. We talked for a while about being more opinionated in things
like architecture and deployment dependencies. I don’t think we
resolved this one, but I’m sure the discussion fed into the DLM
discussion later that day in a separate session.

4. Improving consistency of quota management across projects came
up.  We’ve talked in the past about a separate quota management
library or service, but no one has yet stepped up to spearhead the
effort to launch such a project.

5. Rolling upgrades was a very popular topic, in the room and on
the product working group’s priority list. The point was made that
this requires a shift in thinking about how to design and implement
projects, not just some simple code changes that can be rolled out
in a single cycle. I know many teams are looking at addressing
rolling upgrades.

6. os-cloud-config support in clients was raised. There is a
cross-project spec at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/236712/ to
cover this.

7. "Fixing existing things as a priority over features” came up,
and has been a recurring topic of discussion for a few cycles now.
The idea of having a “maintenance” cycle where all teams was floated,
though it might be tough to get everyone aligned to doing that at
the same time.  Alternately, if we work out a way to support
individual teams doing that we could let teams schedule them as
they feel they are useful. We could also dedicate more review time
to maintenance than features, without excluding features entirely.
There seemed to be quite a bit of support in the room for the general
idea, though making it actionable will take some more thought.

8. Mike Perez is working with teams to increase our third-party CI
for vendor-specific drivers and other deployment choices. This theme
wouldn’t necessarily apply to every team, but there was a lot of
support for it.

9. Training more contributors to debug gate issues came up late in
the session. Anita Kuno has taken up this challenge, and has started
collecting useful resources in a mailing list thread, the archives
for which are split across 2 months, so see both [2] and [3] if you
missed it in your email client.

10. We wrapped up with a short discussion of making sure we have
all the necessary cross-project liaisons in place to ensure good
communication and coordination. Liaisons for Mitaka are listed in
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/mitaka-crossproject-themes
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-October/077913.html
[3] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-November/078173.html