Open Stack

[trimming down the cc list, writing to user-committee because I believe
this is more of a general question for the app-dev working group than it
is a defcore thing. Feel free to forward if you think it's appropriate.]

On 09/15/2016 03:11 PM, Rochelle Grober wrote:
> "The interop challenge was started in July 2016 to create a set of 
> common workloads/tests to be executed across multiple OpenStack 
> distributions and/or cloud deployment models. The participants in
> this challenge will work together to prove once and for all that 
> OpenStack-Powered clouds are interoperable."

this project sounds really interesting. At DreamHost I gave it a
shot, starting from the simplest (for me) challenge: Ansible and lamp stack.

I immediately hit a major issue: the default customer of DreamHost cloud
will not have private networking enabled, so the playbook cannot
run as is. To support a cloud like DreamHost, it would require some
major changes.

Finding out about this issue lead my thoughts down a rabbit hole: does
this effort even make sense? I don't have an answer...

My line of thoughts starts with what looks like a great promise: "take
this ansible playbook and run it on any OpenStack cloud unchanged".
Great promise, makes for a great demo on a stage.

But this promise fails very very quickly because different clouds always
have different behaviors. DreamHost Cloud runs vanilla OpenStack and
yet, this stuff doesn't work out of the box. Sure, we can add some logic
to the script to take into consideration the absence of a private
network but is it worth it?

What value is there in writing a script that covers a very specific use
case (LAMP stack+Wordpress on 4 nodes) and needs to be adapted slightly
to every single openstack cloud in order to run? Is the time spent in
developing such universally valid playbook a good investment?

Would it be more valuable for the providers of openstack clouds to have
a pool of playbooks that would serve as source of inspiration, something
that could be adapted quickly and consumed in downstream documentation?

Again, I don't have an answer. I am just noticing that because of
different cloud behaviors, DreamHost has no use of most of the
community-contributed efforts in the Apps Developers space. This makes
me wonder if we as a community are putting our efforts in the wrong
places or it's just DreamHost facing these issue.

Thoughts?
/stef