Open Stack

WARNING:

Danger, Will Robinson! Strong opinions ahead!

On 06/26/2018 10:00 PM, Zane Bitter wrote:
> On 26/06/18 09:12, Jay Pipes wrote:
>> Is (one of) the problem(s) with our community that we have too small 
>> of a scope/footprint? No. Not in the slightest.
> 
> Incidentally, this is an interesting/amusing example of what we talked 
> about this morning on IRC[1]: you say your concern is that the scope of 
> *Nova* is too big and that you'd be happy to have *more* services in 
> OpenStack if they took the orchestration load off Nova and left it just 
> to handle the 'plumbing' part (which I agree with, while noting that 
> nobody knows how to get there from here); but here you're implying that 
> Kata Containers (something that will clearly have no effect either way 
> on the simplicity or otherwise of Nova) shouldn't be part of the 
> Foundation because it will take focus away from Nova/OpenStack.

Above, I was saying that the scope of the *OpenStack* community is 
already too broad (IMHO). An example of projects that have made the 
*OpenStack* community too broad are purpose-built telco applications 
like Tacker [1] and Service Function Chaining. [2]

I've also argued in the past that all distro- or vendor-specific 
deployment tools (Fuel, Triple-O, etc [3]) should live outside of 
OpenStack because these projects are more products and the relentless 
drive of vendor product management (rightfully) pushes the scope of 
these applications to gobble up more and more feature space that may or 
may not have anything to do with the core OpenStack mission (and have 
more to do with those companies' product roadmap).

On the other hand, my statement that the OpenStack Foundation having 4 
different focus areas leads to a lack of, well, focus, is a general 
statement on the OpenStack *Foundation* simultaneously expanding its 
sphere of influence while at the same time losing sight of OpenStack 
itself -- and thus the push to create an Open Infrastructure Foundation 
that would be able to compete with the larger mission of the Linux 
Foundation.

[1] This is nothing against Tacker itself. I just don't believe that 
*applications* that are specially built for one particular industry 
belong in the OpenStack set of projects. I had repeatedly stated this on 
Tacker's application to become an OpenStack project, FWIW:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/276417/

[2] There is also nothing wrong with service function chains. I just 
don't believe they belong in *OpenStack*. They more appropriately belong 
in the (Open)NFV community because they just are not applicable outside 
of that community's scope and mission.

[3] It's interesting to note that Airship was put into its own 
playground outside the bounds of the OpenStack community (but inside the 
bounds of the OpenStack Foundation). Airship is AT&T's specific 
deployment tooling for "the edge!". I actually think this was the 
correct move for this vendor-opinionated deployment tool.

> So to answer your question:
> 
> <jaypipes> zaneb: yeah... nobody I know who argues for a small stable 
> core (in Nova) has ever said there should be fewer higher layer services.
> <jaypipes> zaneb: I'm not entirely sure where you got that idea from.

Note the emphasis on *Nova* above?

Also note that when I've said that *OpenStack* should have a smaller 
mission and scope, that doesn't mean that higher-level services aren't 
necessary or wanted.

It's just that Nova has been a dumping ground over the past 7+ years for 
features that, looking back, should never have been added to Nova (or at 
least, never added to the Compute API) [4].

What we were discussing yesterday on IRC was this:

"Which parts of the Compute API should have been implemented in other 
services?"

What we are discussing here is this:

"Which projects in the OpenStack community expanded the scope of the 
OpenStack mission beyond infrastructure-as-a-service?"

and, following that:

"What should we do about projects that expanded the scope of the 
OpenStack mission beyond infrastructure-as-a-service?"

Note that, clearly, my opinion is that OpenStack's mission should be to 
provide infrastructure as a service projects (both plumbing and porcelain).

This is MHO only. The actual OpenStack mission statement [5] is 
sufficiently vague as to provide no meaningful filtering value for 
determining new entrants to the project ecosystem.

I *personally* believe that should change in order for the *OpenStack* 
community to have some meaningful definition and differentiation from 
the broader cloud computing, application development, and network 
orchestration ecosystems.

All the best,
-jay

[4] ... or never brought into the Compute API to begin with. You know, 
vestigial tail and all that.

[5] for reference: "The OpenStack Mission is to produce a ubiquitous 
Open Source Cloud Computing platform that is easy to use, simple to 
implement, interoperable between deployments, works well at all scales, 
and meets the needs of users and operators of both public and private 
clouds."

> I guess from all the people who keep saying it ;)
> 
> Apparently somebody was saying it a year ago too :D
> https://twitter.com/zerobanana/status/883052105791156225
> 
> cheers,
> Zane.
> 
> [1] 
> http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-tc/%23openstack-tc.2018-06-26.log.html#t2018-06-26T15:30:33 
> 
> 
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