Open Stack

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 6:20 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Fox, Kevin M's message of 2017-03-10 23:45:06 +0000:
>> So, this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about... OpenStack today is
>> more then just IaaS in the tent. Trove (DBaaS), Sahara (Hadoop,Spark,etc
>> aaS), Zaqar (Messaging aaS) and many more services. But they seem to be
>> treated as second class citizens, as they are not "IaaS".
>>
>
> It's not that they're second class citizens. It's that their community
> is smaller by count of users, operators, and developers. This should not
> come as a surprise, because the lowest common denominator in any user
> base will always receive more attention.
>
>> > Why should it strive to be anything except an excellent building block
>> for other technologies?
>>
>> You misinterpret my statement. I'm in full agreement with you. The
>> above services should be excellent building blocks too, but are suffering
>> from lack of support from the IaaS layer. They deserve the ability to
>> be excellent too, but need support/vision from the greater community
>> that hasn't been forthcoming.
>>
>
> You say it like there's some over arching plan to suppress parts of the
> community and there's a pack of disgruntled developers who just can't
> seem to get OpenStack to work for Trove/Sahara/AppCatalog/etc.
>
> We all have different reasons for contributing in the way we do.  Clearly,
> not as many people contribute to the Trove story as do the pure VM-on-nova
> story.
>
>> I agree with you, we should embrace the container folks and not treat
>> them as separate. I think thats critical if we want to allow things
>> like Sahara or Trove to really fulfil their potential. This is the path
>> towards being an OpenSource AWS competitor, not just for being able to
>> request vm's in a cloudy way.
>>
>> I think that looks something like:
>> OpenStack Advanced Service (trove, sahara, etc) -> Kubernetes ->
>> Nova VM or Ironic Bare Metal.
>>
>
> That's a great idea. However, AFAICT, Nova is _not_ standing in Trove,
> Sahara, or anyone else's way from doing this. Seriously, try it. I'm sure
> it will work.  And in so doing, you will undoubtedly run into friction
> from the APIs. But unless you can describe that _now_, you have to go try
> it and tell us what broke first. And then you can likely submit feature
> work to nova/neutron/cinder to make it better. I don't see anything in
> the current trajectory of OpenStack that makes this hard. Why not just do
> it? The way you ask, it's like you have a team of developers just sitting
> around shaving yaks waiting for an important OpenStack development task.
>
> The real question is why aren't Murano, Trove and Sahara in most current
> deployments? My guess is that it's because most of our current users
> don't feel they need it. Until they do, Trove and Sahara will not be
> priorities. If you want them to be priorities _pay somebody to make them
> a priority_.

This particular point really caught my attention.  You imply that
these additional services are not widely deployed because _users_
don't want them.  The fact is most users are completely unaware of
them because these services require the operator of the cloud to
support them.  In fact they often require the operator of the cloud to
support them from the initial deployment, as these services (and
*most* OpenStack services) are frighteningly difficult to add to an
already deployed cloud without downtime and high risk of associated
issues.

I think it's unfair to claim these services are unpopular because
users aren't asking for them when it's likely users aren't even aware
of them (do OVH, Vexxhost, Dreamhost, Raskspace or others provide a
user-facing list of potential OpenStack services with a voting option?
 Not that I've ever seen!)

I bring this up to point out how much more popular ALL of these
services would be if the _users_ were able to enable them without
requiring operator intervention and support.

Based on our current architecture, it's nearly impossible for a new
project to be deployed on a cloud without cloud-level admin
privileges.  Additionally almost none of the projects could even work
this way (with Rally being a notable exception).  I guess I'm kicking
this dead horse because for a long time I've argued we need to back
away from the tightly coupled nature of all the projects, but
(speaking of horses) it seems that horse is already out of the barn.
(I really wish I could work in one more proverb dealing with horses
but it's getting late on a Friday so I'll stop now.)

-Christopher


>> Not what we have today:
>> OpenStack Advanced Service -> Nova VM or Ironic Bare Metal
>>
>> due to the focus on the api's of VM's being only for IaaS and not for
>> actually running cloud software on.
>>
>
> The above is an unfounded and unsupported claim. What _exactly_ would
> you want Nova/Neutron/Cinder's API to do differently to support "cloud
> software" better? Why is everyone dodging that question? Name one
> specific change and how it would actually be consumed.
>
> I personally think it's just the general frustration that comes at
> this stage of maturity of a project. There's a contraction of hype,
> lower investment in general, and everyone is suppressing their panic
> and trying to reason about what we can do to make it better, but nobody
> actually knows. Meanwhile, our users and operators need us to keep
> making things better. Some are even _paying us_ to make things better.
>
>> I'm sorry if that sounds a bit confusing. Its hard to
>> explain. I can try and elaborate if you want. Zane's
>> posting here does help explain it a little: >
>> http://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2015/04/24#a-vision-for-openstack
>>
>
> Honest, I don't understand the reality that Zane's vision is driving at in
> that post. More Zaqar? Why not just do that? What's standing in the way?
>
>> The other alternative is to clearly define OpenStack to be just IaaS,
>> and kick all the non IaaS stuff out of the tent. (I do not prefer
>> this). It will hurt in the short term but long tern could be better
>> for those projects then the current status quo as new opportunities for
>> switching base dependencies will present themselves and no longer will
>> be hamstrung by those that feel their use case isn't important or think
>> that the existing api's are "good enough" to handle the use case.
>>
>
> Why would we kick out perfectly healthy pieces of software that want
> to be OpenStack-native? Nobody is saying that IaaS clouds aren't well
> complimented by native higher level projects. But in the app catalog
> case, there's little consumption, and waning contribution, so it's worth
> considering whether its continued maintenance and existence is a drain
> on the overall community. Sounds like it is, and we'll probably need to
> shut it down, and direct those efforts to liasing with outside projects
> and services like Dockerhub, Heroku, Bitnami, etc.
>
> Forgive me if I sound reactive. I just want to remind everyone that this
> is a do-ocracy. You can say what you want the vision to be all you want,
> you can also ask for a vision, but you can't _really_ change anything
> here on the mailing list. You have to write a spec, get it landed, and
> do the work. I think you'll be surprised how little resistance you get
> if you go ahead and _JFDI_.
>
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