Open Stack

Excerpts from Geoff O'Callaghan's message of 2016-05-24 10:59:13 +1000:
> Surely openstack is defined by it’s capabilities and interfaces rather than it’s internals.  Given the simplistic view that openstack is a collection of micro services connected by well defined api’s does it really matter what code is used inside that micro service (or macro service )?   If there is a community willing to bring and support code in language ‘x’,  isn’t that better than worrying about the off chance of existing developers wishing to move projects and not knowing the target language?    Is there a fear that we’ll end up with a fork of nova (or others) written in rust ?
> If we’re not open to evolving then we’ll die.
> 
> Just throwing in a different perspective.

Thanks Geoff. Your perspective is one that has been considered many
times. That is an engineering perspective though, and ignores the people
and businesses that are the users of OpenStack. We don't just shove the
code out the door and say "good luck!".

So, each new aspect of the internals that the people and business must
evaluate is another hurdle to adoption at some level. If OpenStack is
the fastest open source cloud platform ever, but only gets adopted by
the 5 largest cloud users on the planet, and smaller organizations are
forced to invest their money in closed source appliance based clouds,
then we'll all suffer, as neither of those options will stand a chance
against the large scale efforts of the established players like Amazon,
Google, and Microsoft.

Likewise, if OpenStack is adopted by the bulk of small/medium businesses
needing clouds, but nobody can run it at scale, we will also be crushed
as users develop elastic workloads that need to be moved onto a large
scale cloud.

And if there are simply two, one for big clouds, and one for small,
they'll never be fully compatible. It will be like POSIX... moderately
useful for a limited set of applications, but most things will have to
be optimized for each different implementation, wasting everyone's time
porting when they should be developing.

So, while this doesn't mean we should just force everything onto Python,
it does mean that we should remain as cohesive as we can when making
choices like this. So the question "What is OpenStack" needs to be
asked, so we can evaluate what should be kept close together, and what
might be better off as an independent component.