Open Stack

On 04/11/2016 09:43 AM, Allison Randal wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Davanum Srinivas <davanum at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Reading unofficial notes [1], i found one topic very interesting:
>>> One Platform – How do we truly support containers and bare metal under
>>> a common API with VMs? (Ironic, Nova, adjacent communities e.g.
>>> Kubernetes, Apache Mesos etc)
>>>
>>> Anyone present at the meeting, please expand on those few notes on
>>> etherpad? And how if any this feedback is getting back to the
>>> projects?
>
> It was really two separate conversations that got conflated in the
> summary. One conversation was just being supportive of bare metal, VMs,
> and containers within the OpenStack umbrella. The other conversation
> started with Monty talking about his work on shade, and how it wouldn't
> exist if more APIs were focused on the way users consume the APIs, and
> less an expression of the implementation details of each project.
> OpenStackClient was mentioned as a unified CLI for OpenStack focused
> more on the way users consume the CLI. (OpenStackSDK wasn't mentioned,
> but falls in the same general category of work.)
>
> i.e. There wasn't anything new in the conversation, it was more a matter
> of the developers/TC members on the board sharing information about work
> that's already happening.

I agree with that - but would like to clarify the 'bare metal, VMs and 
containers' part a bit. (an in fact, I was concerned in the meeting that 
the messaging around this would be confusing because we 'supporting bare 
metal' and 'supporting containers' mean two different things but we use 
one phrase to talk about it.

It's abundantly clear at the strategic level that having OpenStack be 
able to provide both VMs and Bare Metal as two different sorts of 
resources (ostensibly but not prescriptively via nova) is one of our 
advantages. We wanted to underscore how important it is to be able to do 
that, and wanted to underscore that so that it's really clear how 
important it is any time the "but cloud should just be VMs" sentiment 
arises.

The way we discussed "supporting containers" was quite different and was 
not about nova providing containers. Rather, it was about reaching out 
to our friends in other communities and working with them on making 
OpenStack the best place to run things like kubernetes or docker swarm. 
Those are systems that ultimately need to run, and it seems that good 
integration (like kuryr with libnetwork) can provide a really strong 
story. I think pretty much everyone agrees that there is not much value 
to us or the world for us to compete with kubernetes or docker.

So, we do want to be supportive of bare metal and containers - but the 
specific _WAY_ we want to be supportive of those things is different for 
each one.

Monty