Open Stack

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com>
Reply: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Date: May 24, 2016 at 11:35:42
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Subject:  Re: [openstack-dev] [all][tc] Languages vs. Scope of "OpenStack"

> On 05/24/2016 06:19 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > Chris Dent wrote:
> >> [...]
> >> I don't really know. I'm firmly in the camp that OpenStack needs to
> >> be smaller and more tightly focused if a unitary thing called OpenStack
> >> expects to be any good. So I'm curious about and interested in
> >> strategies for figuring out where the boundaries are.
> >>
> >> So that, of course, leads back to the original question: Is OpenStack
> >> supposed to be a unitary.
> >
> > As a data point, since I heard that question rhetorically asked quite a
> > few times over the past year... There is an old answer to that, since a
> > vote of the PPB (the ancestor of our TC) from June, 2011 which was never
> > overruled or changed afterwards:
> >
> > "OpenStack is a single product made of a lot of independent, but
> > cooperating, components."
> >
> > The log is an interesting read:
> > http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/openstack-meeting/2011/openstack-meeting.2011-06-28-20.06.log.html  
>  
> Hmm, blast from the past. I'm sad I didn't make it to that meeting.
>  
> I would (now at least) have voted for #2: OpenStack is "a collection of
> independent projects that work together for some level of integration
> and releases".
>  
> This is how I believe OpenStack should be seen, as I wrote on Twitter
> relatively recently:
>  
> https://twitter.com/jaypipes/status/705794815338741761
> https://twitter.com/jaypipes/status/705795095262441472

I'm honestly in the same boat as Chris. And I've constantly heard both. I also frankly am not sure I agree with the idea that OpenStack is one product. I think more along the lines of the way DefCore specifies OpenStack Compute as a Product, etc. I feel like if every project contributed to the OpenStack product, we might have a better adoption rate and a better knowledge base for how to make new services scale from day 1. Instead, we are definitely a loose collection of projects that integrate on some levels and produce what various people might combine to create a cloud.

I'm also not entirely that the answer remains true with the different defcore programs. It seems like DefCore makes us define a minimum viable OpenStack {Compute,Object Storage} and then you can add to that. But those two things are "OpenStack" and everything else is a nice additional feature. There's nothing that makes Barbican or Magnum or Ceilometer a core part of OpenStack. Yet they're projects of varying popularity that different people choose whether or not to deploy. If OpenStack were a product, I'd think that not deploying Ceilometer would be the exception.

--  
Ian Cordasco