Open Stack

On 03/06/2017 06:26 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> The App Catalog was created early 2015 as a marketplace of pre-packaged
> applications that you can deploy using Murano. Initially a demo by
> Mirantis, it was converted into an open upstream project team, and
> deployed as a "beta" as apps.openstack.org.
>
> Since then it grew additional categories (Glance images, Heat & Tosca
> templates), but otherwise did not pick up a lot of steam. The website
> (still labeled "beta") features 45 glance images, 6 Tosca templates, 13
> heat templates and 94 murano packages (~30% of which are just thin
> wrappers around Docker containers). Traffic stats show around 100 visits
> per week, 75% of which only read the index page.
>
> In parallel, Docker developed a pretty successful containerized
> application marketplace (the Docker Hub), with hundreds of thousands of
> regularly-updated apps. Keeping the App Catalog around (including its
> thinly-wrapped Docker container Murano packages) make us look like we
> are unsuccessfully trying to compete with that ecosystem, while
> OpenStack is in fact completely complementary.
>
> In the past we have retired projects that were dead upstream. The App
> Catalog is not in this case: it has an active maintenance team, which
> has been successfully maintaining the framework and accepting
> applications. If we end up retiring the App Catalog, it would clearly
> not be a reflection on that team performance, which has been stellar
> despite limited resources. It would be because the beta was arguably not
> successful in building an active marketplace of applications, and
> because its continuous existence is not a great fit from a strategy
> perspective. Such removal would be a first for our community, but I
> think it's now time to consider it.
>
> Before we discuss or decide anything at the TC level, I'd like to
> collect everyone thoughts (and questions) on this. Please feel free to
> reply to this thread (or reach out to me privately if you prefer). Thanks !

Mirantis' position is that the App Catalog was a good idea, but we agree 
with you that other application repositories like DockerHub and Quay.io 
are both more useful and more actively used.

The OpenStack App Catalog does indeed seem to unnecessarily compete with 
those application repositories, and we would support its retirement if 
that is what the community would like to do. We'll provide resources and 
help in winding anything down if needed.

Best,
-jay