Open Stack

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016, at 09:03 AM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
> 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).

As someone that semi frequently has to reproduce gate results my current
setup involves semi frequently building the infra test images locally
using openstack-infra/project-config/tools/build-image.sh then booting
this image on my workstation using kvm. With that I can easily run a
devstack-gate reproduce.sh or tox -e whatever and have a high degree of
confidence that my setup mirrors the gate's.

When I worked for HP I did similar on top of HPCloud. This actually
worked very well as I could much more easily share the results. If I had
my choice of setup I would just ask for a set of openstack cloud
credentials with a reasonable amount of quota. Dogfooding has been a
great way to understand how openstack works and I think it has produced
valuable feedback helping openstack improve.

Granted this is much harder to hand out when you need specific hardware
resources (network switches, server hardware, whatever), but with Ironic
most of that should be doable with the "give devs cloud credentials"
model.

As for requesting an environment with nova version foo and neutron
version bar and topology baz devstack does this a few thousand times per
day. It may not be everyone's preferred tool, but my suggestion would be
to not make another tool that does this and never gets tested. Instead
use what is being tested.

TL;DR dogfood and use openstack, it solves this problem well.

Clark