[Openstack] Project Alignment

Vishvananda Ishaya vishvananda at gmail.com
Mon May 16 17:11:44 UTC 2011


Hello Everyone,

The PTLs had a quick meeting the other day  to try and align some things between the projects.  In order for openstack to be successful, it is very important that we create a consistent user experience for users and administrators.  We realize that it is hard to find agreement between all developers on implementation details, so we focused less on the idea of code-sharing and more on the idea of bringing the user-experience into alignment. If we are going to be successful in this effort, we all need to realize that we should value doing things the same way over doing things the best way.

We have a few actions that we are taking to help move in this direction.
1. Consistent Auth -- all of the projects are working on integrating the keystone project so that we have one auth system.  For nova, this means that we may lose some of the rbac features we provide for the ec2 api, but by the diablo release we expect to have equivalent features and a migration plan for cactus deployments.

2. Consistent Daemonization -- Jay is working on turning swift-init into a pypy library that can be used by all of the projects.  This will allow consistent init scripts etc.

3. Consistent Logging -- We are going to make an effort for all of the projects to support python's logging.config for advanced logging configuration. We would also like to provide a sane set of defaults (i.e. default to syslog or file), since currently they are all different.

4. Skeleton Project -- We are going to attempt to provide a simple skeleton projects for people experimenting with new services to use as a base.  It will include the above items pre-configured, as well as provide some sane defaults for wsgi and REST apis.  There are a few disagreements as to the best libraries to use, so both Jay and Termie are going to work on these. My guess is that they will agree on 90% of the skeleton, and just have a few differences, which is a great place to put in pluggability.  We should end up with a nice simple base project with a small number of feature options.

(FUTURE) Configs vs. Flags: There is a desire to move to consistent configuration for the services.  Nova uses gflags, whereas the other projects use config files and option parsing.  It would be nice to converge here, but we are delaying for the moment because there are a lot of changes going into nova right now.  We will reexamine this later.






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