[openstack-dev] [all] Proposal: Architecture Working Group

Amrith Kumar amrith at tesora.com
Wed Jun 22 13:15:03 UTC 2016


Clint,

In your original email, you proposed "So, with that, I'd like to propose the creation of an Architecture Working Group. This group's charge would not be design by committee, but a place for architects to share their designs and gain support across projects to move forward with and ratify architectural decisions."

I like parts of this, and parts of this trouble me. But, I volunteered to be part of this activity because I have a real problem that this group could help me solve and I bet there are others who have this problem as well.

As you say, there are often problems, questions, and challenges of an architectural nature, that have a scope larger than a single project. I would like there to be a forum whose primary focus is to provide an avenue where these can be discussed. I would like it to be a place less noisy than "take it to the ML" and be a place where one could pose these questions and potentially discuss solutions that other projects have adopted.

The part I'm uncomfortable is the implied decision making authority of "ratifying architectural decisions". To ratify implies the ability to make official, the ability to "approve and sanction formally" and I ask whence came this power and authority?

Who currently has this power and authority, and is that individual or group delegating it to this working group?

While this ML thread is very interesting, it is also beginning to fragment and I would like to propose a spec in Gerrit with a draft charter for this working group and a review there.

-amrith


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Clint Byrum [mailto:clint at fewbar.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 2:34 PM
> To: openstack-dev <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all] Proposal: Architecture Working Group
> 
> Excerpts from Jay Pipes's message of 2016-06-21 12:47:46 -0400:
> > On 06/21/2016 04:25 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
> > > However, I worry deeply that it could become astronauts with finger
> > > paints.
> >
> > Yes. This.
> >
> > I will happily take software design suggestions from people that
> > demonstrate with code and benchmarks that their suggestion actually
> > works outside of the theoretical/academic/MartinFowler landscape and
> > actually solves a real problem better than existing code.
> >
> 
> So, I want to be careful not to descend too far into reductionism.
> Nobody is suggesting that an architecture WG goes off into the corner
> and applies theory to problems without practical application.
> 
> However, some things aren't measured in how fast, or even how reliable
> a piece of code is. Some things are measured in how understandable the
> actual code and deployment is.
> 
> If we architect a DLM solution, refactor out all of the one-off DLM-esque
> things, and performance and measured reliability stay flat, did we fail?
> What about when the locks break, and an operator has _one_ way to fix
> locks, instead of 5? How do we measure that?
> 
> So I think what I want to focus on is: We have to have some real basis
> on which to agree that an architecture that is selected is worth the
> effort to refactor things around it. But I can't promise that every
> problem has an objectively measurable solution. Part of the point of
> having a working group is to develop a discipline for evaluating hard
> problems like that.
> 
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