Open Stack

Finally found the time to properly read this...

Zane Bitter wrote:
> [...]
> We chose to add features to Nova to compete with vCenter/oVirt, and not 
> to add features the would have enabled OpenStack as a whole to compete 
> with more than just the compute provisioning subset of EC2/Azure/GCP.

Could you give an example of an EC2 action that would be beyond the 
"compute provisioning subset" that you think we should have built into 
Nova ?

> Meanwhile, the other projects in OpenStack were working on building the 
> other parts of an AWS/Azure/GCP competitor. And our vague one-sentence 
> mission statement allowed us all to maintain the delusion that we were 
> all working on the same thing and pulling in the same direction, when in 
> truth we haven't been at all.

Do you think that organizing (tying) our APIs along [micro]services, 
rather than building a sanely-organized user API on top of a 
sanely-organized set of microservices, played a role in that divide ?

> We can decide that we want to be one, or the other, or both. But if we 
> don't all decide together then a lot of us are going to continue wasting 
> our time working at cross-purposes.

If you are saying that we should choose between being vCenter or AWS, I 
would definitely say the latter. But I'm still not sure I see this issue 
in such a binary manner.

Imagine if (as suggested above) we refactored the compute node and give 
it a user API, would that be one, the other, both ? Or just a sane 
addition to improve what OpenStack really is today: a set of open 
infrastructure components providing different services with each their 
API, with slight gaps and overlaps between them ?

Personally, I'm not very interested in discussing what OpenStack could 
have been if we started building it today. I'm much more interested in 
discussing what to add or change in order to make it usable for more use 
cases while continuing to serve the needs of our existing users. And I'm 
not convinced that's an either/or choice...

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)