Open Stack

All good points, but I’m not sure about the 3-5 window…it’s so anti-cloud. Although I think many of us are not doing cloudy things with OpenStack.

That said, RedHat’s stable OSP releases are trailing 6mos behind community releases. And many of us do site-stability testing that lasts for months before actually going live. And many of us just YOLO cloud it and do upgrades in place, but I think this is fairly rare.

I wouldn’t ask for 3-5 year coverage..but 18-24 mos sure would be nice.


From: matt [mailto:matt at nycresistor.com]
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 1:18 PM
To: Tom Cameron
Cc: openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] [stable][all] Keeping Juno "alive" for longer.

Hell.  There's no clear upgrade path, and no guaranteed matched functionality just for starters.

Also most enterprise deployments do 3 to 5 year deployment plans.   This ties into how equipment / power / resources are budgeted in the project plans.  They don't work with this mentality of rapid release cycles.

We assumed early on that the people deploying OpenStack would be more agile because of the ephemeral nature of cloud.  That's not really what's happening. There are good and bad reasons for that.  One good reason is policy certification.  By the time a team has prepped, built, tested an environment and is moving to production it's already been an entire release ( or two since most ops refuse to use a fresh release for stability reasons ).  By the time it passes independent security / qa testing and development workflows for deploying apps to the environment it's been 3-4 releases or more. But more often than not the problem is most of the VM workloads aren't good with ephemeral and mandating downtime on systems is an onerous change control process.  Making the upgrade process for the environment very difficult and time consuming.

More than that vendors that provide extra ( sometimes necessary ) additions to openstack, such as switch vendors take at least a few months to test a new release and certify their drivers for deployment.  Most folks aren't even beginning to deploy a fresh release of openstack EVEN if they wanted to until it's been out for at least six months.   It's not like they can really test pre-rc releases and expect their tests to mean anything.

There's almost no one riding the wave of new deployments.


On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Tom Cameron <Tom.Cameron at rackspace.com<mailto:Tom.Cameron at rackspace.com>> wrote:
>I would not call that the extreme minority.
>I would say a good percentage of users are on only getting to Juno now.

The survey seems to indicate lots of people are on Havana, Icehouse and Juno in production. I would love to see the survey ask _why_ people are on older versions because for many operators I suspect they forked when they needed a feature or function that didn't yet exist, and they're now stuck in a horrible parallel universe where upstream has not only added the missing feature but has also massively improved code quality. Meanwhile, they can't spend the person hours on either porting their work into the new Big Tent world we live in, or can't bare the thought of having to throw away their hard earned tech debt. For more on this, see the myth of the "sunken cost".

If it turns out people really are deploying new clouds with old versions on purpose because of a perceived stability benefit, then they aren't reading the release schedule pages close enough to see that what they're deploying today will be abandoned soon in the future. In my _personal_ opinion which has nothing to do with Openstack or my employer, this is really poor operational due diligence.

If, however, a deployer has been working on a proof of concept for 18-24 months and they're now ready to go live with their cloud running a release from 18-24 months ago, I have sympathy for them. The bigger the deployment, the harder this one is to solve which makes it a prime candidate for the LTS strategy.

Either way, we've lost the original conversation long ago. It sounds like we all agree that an LTS release strategy suits most needs but also that it would take a lot of work that hasn't yet been thought of or started. Maybe there should be a session in Austin for this topic after blueprints are submitted and discussed? It would be nice to have the operators and developers input in a single place, and to get this idea on the radar of all of the projects.

--
Tom Cameron


________________________________________
From: Maish Saidel-Keesing <maishsk at maishsk.com<mailto:maishsk at maishsk.com>>
Sent: Monday, November 9, 2015 14:29
To: Tom Cameron; Jeremy Stanley; openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] [stable][all] Keeping Juno "alive" for longer.

On 11/09/15 21:01, Tom Cameron wrote:
>  From your other thread...
>
>> Or else you're saying you intend to fix the current inability of our projects to skip intermediate releases entirely during upgrades
> I think without knowing it, that's what most would be suggesting, yeah. Of course, like you mentioned, the real work is in how upgrades get refactored to skip intermediate releases (two or three of them).
>
> DB schema changes can basically be rolled up and kept around for a while, so that's not too be a problem. Config files OTOH have no schema or schema validator, so that would require tooling and all kinds of fun (bug prone) wizardry.
>
> This is all solvable, but it adds complexity for the sake of what I can only imagine are the extreme minority of users. What do the user/operator surveys say about the usage of older releases? What portion of the user base is actually on releases prior to Havana?
I would not call that the extreme minority.
I would say a good percentage of users are on only getting to Juno now.
>
> --
> Tom Cameron
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org<mailto:fungi at yuggoth.org>>
> Sent: Monday, November 9, 2015 12:35
> To: openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org>
> Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [openstack-dev] [stable][all] Keeping Juno "alive" for longer.
>
> On 2015-11-09 17:11:35 +0000 (+0000), Tom Cameron wrote:
> [...]
>> I support an LTS release strategy because it will allow more
>> adoption for more sectors by offering that stability everyone's
>> talking about. But, it shouldn't be a super-super long support
>> offering. Maybe steal some of Ubuntu's game and do an LTS every 4
>> releases or so (24 months), but then maybe Openstack only supports
>> them for 24 months time? Again, my concern is that this is free,
>> open source software and you're probably not going to get many
>> community members to volunteer to offer their precious time fixing
>> bugs in a 2-year-old codebase that have been fixed for 18 months
>> in a newer version.
> [...]
>
> Because we want people to be able upgrade their deployments, the
> problem runs deeper than just backporting some fixes to a particular
> branch for longer periods of time. Unfortunately the original poster
> cross-posted this thread to multiple mailing lists so the discussion
> has rapidly bifurcated, but I addressed this particular topic in my
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-November/078735.html
> reply.
> --
> Jeremy Stanley
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-operators mailing list
> OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org>
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-operators
> _______________________________________________
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> OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org>
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--
Best Regards,
Maish Saidel-Keesing
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