Open Stack

Hi folks (dev and more!),

I was having a conversation with some folks at godaddy around our future 
plans for a developer lab (where we can have various setups of 
networking, compute, storage...) for 'exploring' purposes (testing out a 
new LBAAS for example or ...) and as well as for 'developer' purposes 
(aka, the 'I need to reproduce a bug or work on a feature that requires 
having a setup mimicking closer to what we have in staging or production').

And it got me thinking about how other developers (and other companies) 
are doing this. Do various companies have shared labs that their 
developers get partitions of for (periods of) usage (for example for a 
volume vendor I would expect this) or if you are a networking company do 
you hand out miniature networks (with associated gear) as needed (or do 
you build out such labs via SDN and software only)?

Then of course there are the people developing libraries (somewhat of my 
territory), part of that development can just be done locally and 
running of tox and such via that, but often times even that is not 
sufficient (for example pick oslo.messaging or oslo.db, altering this in 
ways that could pass unittests could still end up breaking its 
integration with other projects); so the gate helps here (but the gate 
really is a 'last barrier') so have folks that have been working on say 
zeromq or the newer amqp versions, what is the daily life of testing and 
exploring features and development for you?

Are any of the environments that people may be getting build-out on 
demand (ie in a cloud-like manner)? For example I could see how it could 
be pretty nifty to request a environment be built out with say something 
like the following as a descriptor language:

build_out:
    nova:
       git_url: git://git.openstack.org/openstack/nova
       git_ref: ....
    neutron:
       git_url: <my personal git repo>
       git_ref: my sha
    ....
    topology:
       use_standard_config: true
       build_with_switch_type: XYZ...

I hope this info is not just useful to myself (and maybe it's been 
talked about before, but nothing of recent that I can recall) and I'd be 
very much interested in hearing what other companies (big and small) are 
doing here (and also from folks that are not associated with any 
company, which I guess brings in the question of the OSIC lab).

-Josh