Open Stack

I want to give all interested parties a heads up that I have scheduled a
session in the Macon room from 9:30-10:30 a.m. on Thursday morning
(February 23).

Here's what we need to discuss.  This is from my perspective as Glance
PTL, so it's going to be Glance-centric.  This is a quick narrative
description; please go to the session etherpad [0] to turn this into a
specific set of discussion items.

Glance is the OpenStack image cataloging and delivery service.  A few
cycles ago (Juno?), someone noticed that maybe Glance could be
generalized so that instead of storing image metadata and image data,
Glance could store arbitrary digital "stuff" along with metadata
describing the "stuff".  Some people (like me) thought that this was an
obvious direction for Glance to take, but others (maybe wiser, cooler
heads) thought that Glance needed to focus on image cataloging and
delivery and make sure it did a good job at that.  Anyway, the Glance
mission statement was changed to include artifacts, but the Glance
community never embraced them 100%, and in Newton, Glare split off as
its own project (which made sense to me, there was too much unclarity in
Glance about how Glare fit in, and we were holding back development, and
besides we needed to focus on images), and the Glance mission statement
was re-amended specifically to exclude artifacts and focus on images and
metadata definitions.

OK, so the current situation is:
- Glance "does" image cataloging and delivery and metadefs, and that's
all it does.
- Glare is an artifacts service (cataloging and delivery) that can also
handle images.

You can see that there's quite a bit of overlap.  I gave you the history
earlier because we did try to work as a single project, but it did not
work out.

So, now we are in 2017.  The OpenStack development situation has been
fragile since the second half of 2016, with several big OpenStack
sponsors pulling way back on the amount of development resources being
contributed to the community.  This has left Glare in the position where
it cannot qualify as a Bit Tent project, even though there is interest
in artifacts.

Mike Fedosin, the PTL for Glare, has asked me about Glare becoming part
of the Glance project again.  I will be completely honest, I am inclined
to say "no".  I have enough problems just getting Glance stuff done (for
example, image import missed Ocata).  But in addition to doing what's
right for Glance, I want to do what's right for OpenStack.  And I look
at the overlap and think ...

Well, what I think is that I don't want to go through the Juno-Newton
cycles of argument again.  And we have to do what is right for our users.

The point of this session is to discuss:
- What does the Glance community see as the future of Glance?
- What does the wider OpenStack community (TC) see as the future of Glance?
- Maybe, more importantly, what does the wider community see as the
obligations of Glance?
- Does Glare fit into this vision?
- What kind of community support is there for Glare?

My reading of Glance history is that while some people were on board
with artifacts as the future of Glance, there was not a sufficient
critical mass of the Glance community that endorsed this direction and
that's why things unravelled in Newton.  I don't want to see that happen
again.  Further, I don't think the Glance community got the word out to
the broader OpenStack community about the artifacts project, and we got
a lot of pushback along the lines of "WTF? Glance needs to do images"
variety.  And probably rightly so -- Glance needs to do images.  My
point is that I don't want Glance to take Glare back unless it fits in
with what the community sees as the appropriate direction for Glance.
And I certainly don't want to take it back if the entire Glance
community is not on board.

Anyway, that's what we're going to discuss.  I've booked one of the
fishbowl rooms so we can get input from people beyond just the Glance
and Glare projects.

cheers,
brian

[0] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/pike-glance-glare-discussion