Open Stack

Hello there, Jimmy-

It really sounds like what you are looking for is a traditional support
channel. i.e. an entity whom you are 'paying' to advocate to a community on
your behalf, often with developers. Since you're currently running on
Rackspace, you are covered under the CLA under which those resources have
been donated to the Foundation. I recommend you reach out to Thierry to get
the contact information for your account representative. I'm certain that
Rackspace would be more than happy to assist you in scaling your
applications.

That's the official "dude, we're not a support channel" response. Here's
the "I'm also an engineer" response that actually solves the problem you've
listed:

Firstly, simulated SAN failover feature (multiattach volumes) has been a
coordinated discussion between Nova, Neutron, and Cinder for several cycles
now, and it's been the subject of a whole 45 minute session at the Austin
summit. Work is currently ongoing, but there are too many moving parts that
need to land by feature freeze - in short, it's unlikely to land in Newton.
>From personal experience, Ocata's also a tossup; and that assumes the
feature lands bug free with no performance implications.

With that in mind, I personally would advise you against relying on a
cloud-specific feature like this, because it's actually a limiting factor -
you'd be restricted to a single cloud/region/zone for your DB clustering,
plus it's a version and vendor lock-in; you'd only be able to replicate in
on one zone on one particular OpenStack version.

There's plenty of alternatives. Distributed filesystems are one
(HDFS/Gluster), or the lower-level Distributed Replicated Block Device
(drbd). Also, most databases have their own replication logic included, and
while most of them were not built with cloud operations in mind, they
usually don't require much tweaking to make them perform reliably.

I hope this was helpful :)

Michael Krotscheck


On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 12:16 PM Jimmy Mcarthur <jimmy at tipit.net> wrote:

>
>
> Michael Krotscheck wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 11:50 AM Jimmy Mcarthur <jimmy at tipit.net> wrote:
>
>> An example: you can't currently assign block storage to more than one VM
>> at a time. This is something that I think is just sitting around as a patch
>> to be approve in Neutron, but it's causing major problems for us as web
>> application developers that are deploying on top of OpenStack. Basically,
>> as a result of this and the lack of replication in Trove, we can't cluster.
>>
>>
>
>> It's remarkably difficult to get integrated in IRC channels without
>> knowing the lingo. Is there some suggestion from the user committee about
>> where users like us could turn?
>>
>
> To address this specific issue: It sounds like you want to land a specific
> feature in Neutron. The correct place to advocate for this is the weekly
> neutron meeting. As someone who's recently landed a cross-project feature
> (in 23 different projects), I can confidently say that every team is open
> to - if occasionally grumpy about - unscheduled features that aren't on
> their roadmap. It took me only a few questions, and quite a bit of
> humility, to be given a primer on each teams' approval governance, approval
> process, and roadmap feature selection.
>
> Maybe I wasn't clear about my role in OpenStack :) I'm not an OpenStack
> developer. I'm a web and mobile application developer (more appropriately,
> a project manager) that hosts our sites on OpenStack public cloud. I don't
> have a patch to land in Neutron. I understand that it was already done and
> is waiting for approval by that team.
>
>
> OpenStack's governance empowers those who are willing to advocate for
> themselves, as long as they are willing to back their requests with actual
> code. I'm sure that Neutron would be very happy to address and shepherd
> any patches you'd be willing to provide.
>
> Keep in mind that there is no place that I can currently advocate for my
> team, which is why I'm raising the point :) I work for the Foundation
> building web and mobile applications, but rely on OpenStack for
> infrastructure. Specifically, we're running on the Rackspace cloud in the
> same data center as Infra. The features I mention aren't within our skill
> set to develop, but they're critical if OpenStack is to become a viable
> option on which to host scalable web applications that need to share
> data/resources.  Though I'm sure many could do it very ably, I don't expect
> OpenStack developers to come and write PHP or javascript in order to use
> our website. We're valid users of the software you all are doing such a
> great job of building.
>
>
> In regards to understanding the IRC 'lingo', I don't really know what that
> could refer to. Could you clarify?
>
> Like any software product, there is common nomenclature that defines it.
> Even reading the documentation can't possibly catch you up on the history
> of the project and the people, especially since so much of it takes place
> in IRC. If you're not out to become a full time OpenStack developer and
> simply need something to work in a particular way, trying to integrate with
> that project can be pretty tough.
>
> I certainly don't mean to start a great debate, but I would encourage you
> to think of app developers that don't use OpenStack SDKs as well as those
> that do. If we're not providing a place for those users to deliver feedback
> and communicate, we could be missing out on lots of opportunities to study
> how they are using the software. Companies (both large and small) don't
> always have the resources to contribute back to OpenStack anymore than
> every user of Ubuntu can contribute upstream.  There is a whole world of
> application developers out there that have no need/ability to be involved
> at that level.
>
> Cheers!
> Jimmy
>
>
> Michael Krotscheck
>
>
>
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