Open Stack

Hi there,

Jimmy McArthur <jimmy at openstack.org> wrote:
>Good day!
>
>We are putting a call out to any additional Working Groups that might 
>require space for the OpenStack Summit Boston, May 8-11th!  The 
>initial call was for official working groups, but we have additional 
>space that we would love to fill with other Working Groups in need.
>
>Please submit all space requests to speakersupport at openstack.org. All 
>we need is the name of your Working Group and the person that will be 
>adding the presentation details. We will fill them in the order 
>received and send instructions for logging in and entering your data.  
>All requests must be received by Friday, March 31.
>
>If we have additional room (and we likely will), we will open it up to 
>BoFs.

There is no official Working Group for High Availability, but in my
(admittedly biased) experience as the chair of the weekly HA IRC
meetings, the lack of a designated space for HA discussions has been a
problem in pretty much every one of the 9 conference-summits and PTG
I've attended.  I raised this last year:

    http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-August/100570.html

Pretty much all the topics I mentioned in that mail are still
relevant.  The difficulty in coordinating the right kinds of
discussions between the right kind of people is that OpenStack HA is a
mixed pot of topics which overlap to very different degrees.  For
example the use of technologies such as Pacemaker and tooz potentially
span multiple projects, as does feedback from operators[0], whereas
other HA topics can be entirely specific to one project (Neutron is a
good example of this).

Feedback from operators to developers on HA is one area I would
particularly like to see more space for.  For example, there was a
very interesting HA-oriented session at the recent MIL ops meetup:

    https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/MIL-ops-rabbitmq-pitfalls-ha

Unfortunately I was not at the event so I don't know how many upstream
developers attended the session, or if there was any feedback sent to
developers as a consequence.  And conversely, there didn't seem to be
many operators at the Atlanta PTG.  But the main conference events
could serve as a great opportunity for connecting operators with
developers for these kinds of discussions.

I'm hesitant to propose a new HA working group, because I doubt
there'd be sufficient cohesion of interests across the whole group,
and it might well be overkill.  A BoF approach would probably make
more sense, but I have to admit I don't have a lot of experience in
coordinating these kinds of face-to-face discussions, so any advice on
how best to handle this would be most welcome!

Thanks,
Adam