Open Stack

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org> wrote:
> On 01/19/2016 11:44 AM, Christopher Aedo wrote:
>> In our meeting yesterday I had some questions about who we are
>> targeting with the "first OpenStack application" effort[3], and on the
>> call there was agreement that this is still unclear.  I spent some
>> time looking through the mailing list archives as well but did not
>> find anything definitive (though PLEASE point me at any conversations
>> I've missed on this topic).
>
> I don't recall many conversations on that topic but the target of the
> guide is defined on the guide itself:
>
>         This guide is for experienced software developers who want to
>         deploy applications to OpenStack clouds.
>
>         If you are familiar with OpenStack but have not created a cloud
>         application in general or an OpenStack application in
>         particular, this section teaches you how to program with
>         OpenStack components.
>
>> I'm hoping on this thread we can get clarity around the particular app
>> and app developer we hope will benefit from this work.  Mainly that's
>> because OpenStack is at it's heart an IaaS, not a PaaS.
>
> Indeed, one of the things I noticed in the report is the praise for
> Azure and its integration with git: OpenStack doesn't do that and
> probably never will.

Yeah that's not a fair point of comparison unless you include Solum,
or something else serving as a PaaS on top of OpenStack.  But it's
easy to get off into the weeds so maybe this topic gets its own thread
soon :)

>> My take is that we are targeting very large scale apps (at the far
>> extreme, think Netflix) vs. your typical LAMP stack (a low-volume
>> Wordpress blog for instance).  If that is the scale we're talking
>> about, agreeing on that will better inform the guidance we provide to
>> the developers.
>>
>> Alternatively, if we're thinking of smaller apps expected to be
>> available in a marketplace (like https://apps.openstack.org), that
>> will obviously impact our message and guidance.
>
> You presented these options as mutually exclusive: I'm not sure that's
> your intention... I don't think they are: this group has the opportunity
> to provide inspirations to both groups of developers and deployers.
>
> The first app tutorial is only one of the many tools we can use for
> that. I think more basic howtos describing real-world applications (even
> a basic Wordpress setup, for example) may contribute to getting more
> developers interested in using OpenStack. The Workload Reference
> Architecture will hopefully provide content along these lines.

I was going to argue that we need a simpler "first app" guide, but
after spending a whole lot more time reading through the shade one[1]
I talked myself out of it.  This is REALLY great work, and introduces
a bunch of key concepts in a way that I do not think is too confusing
or out of scope after all.

I think more than anything I was reacting to the blog post and and
analysis of the app developer experience.  Unfortunately the
conversation is being tainted by concerns around how to define a
"standard" OpenStack cloud, and a few other issues that at first blush
I thought were outside the scope of what the App Dev WG should be
concerned with.  But the more time I spend thinking about it, the more
relevant I realize some of these concerns are  (though some are still
only peripherally relevant to a "first app" guide; like new user
signup, billing oddities and conflating PaaS and IaaS features for
instance).

I very much agree that we could use a more basic howto as well.  I've
definitely spent some time thinking about these easier cases from the
context of beefing up content in the App Catalog.  I think I can help
on this front at least, and look forward to contributing something
here.

[1]: http://developer.openstack.org/draft/firstapp-shade/

-Christopher