OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest November 26 – December 2

Updates

  • Nova Resource Providers update [2]
  • Nova blueprints update [16]
  • OpenStack-Ansible deploy guide live! [6]

The Future of OpenStack Needs You [1]

  • Need more mentors to help run Upstream Trainings at the summits
  • Interested in doing an abridged version at smaller more local events
  • Contact ildikov or diablo_rojo on IRC if interested

New project: Nimble [3]

  • Interesting chat about bare metal management
  • The project name is likely to change

Community goals for Pike [4]

  • As Ocata is a short cycle it’s time to think about goals for Pike [7]
  • Or give feedback on what’s already started [8]

Exposing project team’s metadata in README files (Cont.) [9]

  • Amrith agrees with the value of Flavio’s proposal that a short summary would be good for new contributors
  • Will need a small API that will generate the list of badges
    • Done- as a part of governance
    • Just a graphical representation of what’s in the governance repo
    • Do what you want with the badges in README files
  • Patches have been pushed to the projects initiating this change

Allowing Teams Based on Vendor-specific Drivers [10]

Cirros Images to Change Default Password [11]

  • New password: gocubsgo
  • Not ‘cubswin:)’ anymore

Destructive/HA/Fail-over scenarios

  • Discussion started about adding end-user focused test suits to test OpenStack clusters beyond what’s already available in Tempest [12]
  • Feedback is needed from users and operators on what preferred scenarios they would like to see in the test suite [5]
  • You can read more in the spec for High Availability testing [13] and the user story describing destructive testing [14] which are both on review

Events discussion [15]

  • Efforts to remove duplicated functionality from OpenStack in the sense of providing event information to end-users (Zaqar, Aodh)
  • It is also pointed out that the information in events can be sensitive which needs to be handled carefully

 

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108084.html

[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107982.html

[3] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107961.html

[4] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108167.html

[5] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108062.html

[6] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108200.html

[7] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/community-goals

[8] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/community-goals-ocata-feedback

[9] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107966.html

[10] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108074.html

[11] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108118.html

[12] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108062.html

[13] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/399618/

[14] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/396142

[15] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108070.html

[16] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/108089.html

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest November 18-25th

Updates:

  • Nova placement/resource provider work [4]
  • New release-announce list and other changes to openstack-announce [5]
  • Formal Discussion of Documenting Upgrades[6]
  • Stewardship Working Group description/update [7]
  • OpenStack Liberty has reached EOL [8]
  • Switching test jobs from Ubuntu Trusty to Xenial on the gate is happening on December 6th [9]

A Continuously Changing Environment:

  • We have core developers who’ve been around for a long while stepping down and giving the opportunity to the “next generation” to take on the responsibility of leadership
  • Thank you for your presence, for teaching and for showing other contributors a good example by embracing open source and OpenStack
    • Andrew Laski (Nova): “As I’ve told people many times when they ask me what it’s like to work on an open source project like this: working on proprietary software exposes you to smart people but you’re limited to the small set of people within an organization, working on a project like this exposed me to smart people from many companies and many parts of the world. I have learned a lot working with you all. Thanks.”
    • Carl Baldwin (Neutron): “This is a great community and I’ve had a great time participating and learning with you all.”
    • Marek Denis (Keystone): “It’s been a great journey, I surely learned a lot and improved both my technical and soft skills.”
  • Thank you for all your hard work!

Community goals for Ocata:

  • Starting with the Newton, our community commits to release goals in order to provide the minimum level of consistency and user experience and to improve certain areas OpenStack-wide [1]
  • The goal is to remove all remaining incubated Oslo code in Ocata[2][3]

Unit Test Setup Changes [10]:

  • Attempt to remove DB dependency from the unit test jobs
    • Special DB jobs still exist to provide workaround where needed along with a script in ‘tools/test-setup.sh’
  • Long term goal is for projects to not use the -db jobs anymore, new changes for them should not be accepted.

Project Info in README Files [11]

  • Increase visibility of fundamental project information that is already available on the governance web site [12]
  • Badges are automatically generated as part of the governance CI [13]
  • Every project is strongly recommended to use this new system to provide information about
    • The project’s state (in Big Tent or not, etc.)
    • Project tags
    • Project capabilities

[1] http://governance.openstack.org/goals/index.html

[2] http://governance.openstack.org/goals/ocata/remove-incubated-oslo-code.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW0mJZe6Jiw

[4] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107600.html

[5] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107629.html

[6] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107570.html

[7] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107712.html

[8] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107184.html

[9] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/106906.html

[10] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107784.html

[11] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/107966.html

[12] http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.html

[13] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/391588/

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest November 5-18

SuccessBot Says

  • mriedem: We’re now running neutron by default in Ocata CI jobs [1].
  • stevemar: fernet token format is now the default format in keystone! thanks lbragstad samueldmq and dolphm for making this happen!
  • Ajaegar: developer.openstack.org is now hosted by OpenStack infra.
  • Tonyb: OpenStack requirements on pypi [2] is now a thing!
  • All

Registration Open For the Project Teams Gathering

  • The first OpenStack Project Teams Gathering event geared toward existing upstream team members, providing a venue for those project teams to meet, discuss and organize the development work for the Pike release.
  • Where: Atlanta, GA
  • When: The week of February 20, 2017
  • Register and get more info [3]
  • Read the FAQ for any questions. If you still have questions, contact Thierry (ttx) over IRC on free node, or email foundation staff at [email protected].
  • Full thread

Follow up on Barcelona Review Cadence Discussions

  • Summary of concerns were Nova is a complex beast. Very few people know even most of it well.
  • There are areas in Nova where mistakes are costly and hard to rectify later.
  • Large amount of code does not merge quickly.
  • Barrier of entry for Nova core is very high.
  • Subsystem maintainer model has been pitched [4].
  • Some believe this is still worth giving a try again in attempt to merge good code quickly.
  • Nova today uses a list of experts [5] to sign off on various changes today.
  • Nova PTL Matt Riedemann’s take:
    • Dislikes the constant comparison of Nova and the Linux kernel. Lets instead say all of OpenStack is the Linux Kernel, and the subsystems are Nova, Cinder, Glance, etc.
    • The bar for Nova core isn’t as high as some people make it out to be:
      • Involvement
      • Maintenance
      • Willingness to own and fix problems.
      • Helpful code reviews.
    • Good code is subjective. A worthwhile and useful change might actually break some other part of the system.
  • Nova core Jay Pipes is supportive of the proposal of subsystems, but with a commitment to gathering data about total review load, merge velocity, and some kind of metric to assess code quality impact.
  • Full thread

Embracing New Languages in OpenStack

  • Technical Committee member Flavio Percoco proposes a list of what the community should know/do before accepting a new language:
    • Define a way to share code/libraries for projects using the language
      • A very important piece is feature parity on the operator.
      • Oslo.config for example, our config files shouldn’t change because of a different implementation language.
      • Keystone auth to drive more service-service interactions through the catalog to reduce the number of things an operator needs to configure directly.
      • oslo.log so the logging is routed to the same places and same format as other things.
      • oslo.messaging and oslo.db as well
    • Work on a basic set of libraries for OpenStack base services
    • Define how the deliverables are distributed
    • Define how stable maintenance will work
    • Setup the CI pipelines for the new language
      • Requirements management and caching/mirroring for the gate.
    • Longer version of this [6].
  • Previous notes when the Golang discussion was started to work out questions [7].
  • TC member Thierry Carrez says the most important in introducing the Go should not another way for some of our community to be different, but another way for our community to be one.
  • TC member Flavio Percoco sees part of the community wide concerns that were raised originated from the lack of an actual process of this evaluation to be done and the lack of up front work, which is something trying to be addressed in this thread.
  • TC member Doug Hellmann request has been to demonstrate not just that Swift needs Go, but that Swift is willing to help the rest of the community in the adoption.
    • Signs of that is happening, for example discussion about how oslo.config can be used in the current version of Swift.
  • Flavio has started a patch that documents his post and the feedback from the thread [8]
  • Full thread

API Working Group News

  • Guidelines that have been recently merged:
    • Clarify why CRUD is not a great descriptor [9]
    • Add guidelines for complex queries [10]
    • Specify time intervals based filtering queries [11]
  • Guidelines currently under review:
    • Define pagination guidelines [12]
    • WIP add API capabilities discovery guideline [13]
    • Add the operator for “not in” to the filter guideline [14]
  • Full thread

OakTree – A Friendly End-user Oriented API Layer

  • The OpenStack summit results of the Interop Challenge shown on stage was awesome. 17 different people from 17 different clouds ran the same workload!
  • One of the reasons it worked is because they all used the Ansible modules we wrote based on the Shade library.
    • Shade contains business logic needed to hide vendor difference in clouds.
    • This means that there is a fantastic OpenStack interoperability story – but only if you program in Python.
  • OakTree is a gRPC-based APO service for OpenStack that is based on the Shade library.
  • Basing OakTree on Shade gets not only the business logic, Shade understands:
    • Multi-cloud world
    • Caching
    • Batching
    • Thundering herd protection sorted to handle very high loads efficiently.
  • The barrier to deployers adding it to their clouds needs to be as low as humanly possible.
  • Exists in two repositories:
    • openstack/oaktree [15]
    • openstack/oaktreemodel [16]
  • OakTree model contains the Protobuf definitions and build scripts to produce Python, C++ and Go code from them.
  • OakTree itself depends on python OakTree model and Shade.
    • It can currently list and search for flavors, images, and floating ips.
    • A few major things that need good community design listed in the todo.rst [17]
  • Full thread

 

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest October 29 to November 4

Cross Project Proprietary Driver Code Recap

  • At the Barcelona design summit there was a cross-project session on the challenge we’re running where to draw the line with proprietary driver code [1].
  • Option 1:
    • All libraries imported by the driver must be licensed such that they are redistributable by package maintainers and must be compatible with the Apache license [2].
    • Existing non-compliant driver code would need to be updated by Queens release.
    • Code that’s not imported at the driver runtime (CLIs, external binaries, remote application servers) are acceptable to not be redistributable.
  • Option 2:
    • Remove all drivers that are not completely open source and contained in the project repositories.
  • Option 3:
    • Require majority of the business logic is in the open source code.
    • Allow third party, non-redistributable libraries and CLIs that are used as more of an “RPC” type interface.
    • Reviewers should be able to review the driver and at least get some idea of the steps the driver is doing to perform requests.
  • Jeremy Stanley would like to take option 1 a step further and provide better guidance. We should recommend against drivers calling proprietary tools. Some vendors go this route because they already have a non-free CLI tool and avoid code cost duplication. Other vendors may do this to copy other vendors.
    • The desire of having things redistributable is so that downstream consumers of OpenStack are not beholden to vendors just to be able to use our (free!) software with hardware they have.
    • For example
      • Vendor decides to stop supporting a proprietary command line tool
      • You decide to stop paying support contracts to download that tool
      • Vendor disappears
  • Full thread

Ocata Release Management Communication

  • To the PTL’s or or volunteers filling in for a PTL:
  • Email
    • The “[release]” topic tag on the openstack-dev mailing list will be used for important messages.
    • Countdown email with updates on focus, tasks, and upcoming dates.
  • IRC
    • Be available on #openstack-release, especially during deadline periods. It’s up to you to configure an IRC bouncer to ensure this.
  • Written documentation
    • Read the Ocata cycle schedule [3].
    • Some projects have their own deadlines. Feel free to submit a patch to this schedule within the openstack/release repository.
  • The Ocata cycle overlaps with several major holidays. If you’re planning time off, please make sure your duties are covered by someone else on your team. Let the release team know about this so they’re not waiting for your +1.
  • Failing to follow through on a needed process step may block you from successfully meeting deadlines or releasing.
  • Releases milestones and deadlines are date-based, not feature based. When the date passes, so does the milestone. If you miss it, you miss it.
  • Full thread

Release Announcements

  • The release team at the Barcelona summit discussed how to improve release announcements as posting them to openstack-dev and openstack-announce has proven to be pretty noisy.
  • Proposed solution is to move these announcements to another mailing list. Choices are:
    • release-announce
    • release-announcements
  • Full thread

POST /api-wg/news

  • API guidelines that will be merged in one week if there is no further feedback:
    • Complex queries [4]
    • Specify time intervals based filtering queries [5]
    • Clarify why CRUD is not a great descriptor [6]
  • Guidelines under review:
    • Define pagination guidelines [7]
    • Add API capabilities discovery [8]
  • Full thread

Release Countdown for Week R-15

  • Focus:
    • Teams should be focusing on wrapping up incomplete work left over from the end of the Newton cycle.
    • Finalizing and announcing plans from the summit
    • Completing specs and blueprints
  • General notes:
    • Stable and independent releases have resumed.
    • We cut time out of the Ocala schedule before the first milestone. Ocata-1 will be during R-14.
  • Release actions:
    • Release liaisons should add their name and contact information to the wiki [9].
    • Release liaisons should configure their IRC clients to join #openstack-release.
    • Release liaisons should review the release models for all deliverables and make any updates with patches to openstack/governance before the first milestone.
    • PTLs should add their acknowledgement of the Ocala series community goal [10]
  • Important dates:
    • Ocata 1 Milestone: 17 Nov
    • Ocata release schedule [11]
  • Full thread

 

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest October 8-14

SuccessBot Says

  • loquacities: Newton docs are live on docs.openstack.org! Way to go docs team \o/
  • dhellmann: OpenStack Newton is officially released!
  • tristanC: 6 TC members elected for Ocata [1].
  • dulek: Cinder gate is now voting on basic rolling upgrades support. One step closer to get assert:supports-rolling-upgrade tag. 🙂
  • More

Thoughts on the TC Election Process

  • When deciding to run, candidates write a long thoughtful essay on their reasons for wanting to serve on the TC.
    • It is rare for anyone to ask follow-up question, or to challenge the candidates to explain their position more definitively.
    • Some people pick by names they are most familiar with and don’t read those candidacy posts.
    • It is believed that it’s rare for someone who hasn’t been a PTL of a large project to be elected.
    • An example of implicit bias, blind auditions for musical orchestras radically changing the selection results [2].
  • Proposal: have candidates self-nominate, but instead of a long candidacy letter, just state their interests in serving.
    • After nominations close, the election officials will assign each candidate with a  non-identifying label (e.g. random number).
    • Candidates will post their thoughts and positions and respond to questions from people.
    • Candidacy essay would be posted in the campaign period, instead of the nomination period. This will exclude biographical information.
    • Perhaps candidates can forward their responses to election officials, who will post them for the candidates and identify only by candidate number.
    • The voting form will only list the candidates’ numbers.
  • Thoughts on the proposal:
    • Not allowing people to judge peoples’ character introduces a fraud incentive. You can tell friends your number secretly. Their implicit bias will make them think this is morally ok, and make them more likely to vote for you.
    • It can be important to identify candidates. For some people, there’s a difference in what they say, and what they end up doing when left calling the shots.
    • Familiarity doesn’t necessarily equal bias. Trust is not bias.
    • A good example [2] of needing to know the speaker and words came out of the thread. Also a reason why anonymous elections for leaders are a bad idea and favor native English speakers.
  • We need several things:
    • Allow time between the nomination and the voting. Some candidates don’t announce until the last day or two. This doesn’t allow much time to get to know them.
    • How to deal with timezone differences. One candidate may post an answer early and get more reaction.
    • Reduce the effect of incumbency.
  • The comparison of orchestra auditions was brought up a couple of cycles ago as well, but could be a bad comparison. The job being asked of people was performing their instrument, and it turns out a lot of things not having to do with performing their instrument were biasing the results.
    • The job of the TC is:
      • Putting the best interests of OpenStack at heart.
      • Be effective in working with a diverse set of folks in our community to get things done.
      • To find areas of friction and remove them.
      • Help set the overall direction for the project that community accepts.
    • Writing a good candidacy email isn’t really good representation of those abilities. It’s the measure of writing a good candidacy email, in English.
  • Sean Dague hopes that when voters vote in the election that they are taking the reputation of individuals into account.
    • Look at the work they did across all of OpenStack.
    • How they got consensus on items.
    • What efforts they are able to get folks to rally around and move forward.
    • When they get stuck and get unstuck.
    • When they ask for help and/or admit they’re out of their element.
    • How they help new folks.
    • How they work with long timers.
    • It’s easy to dismiss it as a popularity contest, however, this is about evaluating the plausible promise that the individuals put forward. Not just ideas they have, but how likely they are to be able to bring them to fruition.
  • Full thread

API Workgroup News

  • API usability tests being conducted at the Barcelona summit [3].
  • Two lively discussions [4]:
    • Collecting and improving error messages across OpenStack.
    • Request semantics with regards to GET and body processing.
  • New guidelines:
    • Add a warning about JSON expectations [5].
  • Guidelines currently under review:
    • Specify time intervals based filtering queries [6].
  • Full thread

Project Teams Gathering from the Ops Perspective

  • The first PTG will be held February 20-24 in Atlanta, GA at the downtown Sheraton hotel.
  • Tickets are $100.
  • Group rate is $185/night.
  • Registration will go live in the next couple of weeks.
  • Horizontal/cross project teams will meet Monday and Tuesday.
  • Vertical projects will meet Wednesday through Friday.
  • There’s a lot of great planning happening around the PTG planning, however, it’s going take some time for operators to figure it out.
  • Tom Fifield gives some notes for the operators:
    • Check out the diagram on the PTG site [7].
      • We’re finally acknowledging a release cycle starts with planning. Now we’ll be finalizing a release, while planning another.
      • This puts the summit at the right place to get feedback and decent ideas from users.
    • The OpenStack summit is the place the entire community gets together.
      • The PTG doesn’t mean the summit becomes a marketing thing. The summit can also include:
        • Pre-spec brainstorming
        • Feedback with users
        • Be involved in strategic direction.
    • Don’t expect Ops at the PTG
      • The PTG has been designed for space to get stuff done. Unless a user is deep in code, they won’t be there. If you want feedback from users, use the summit.
  • For ops-focused teams like Kolla, participating at OpenStack summits and Ops mid cycles are essential. Not everyone has to go to every event though. These teams should organize who is going to what events.
  • If you’re going to the summit in Barcelona, Thierry and Erin from the OpenStack Foundation will be hosting informational presentation on the PTG [8].
  • Full thread

Next PTL/TC Elections Timeframes

  • At the last TC meeting, TC members discussed future election period, with consideration of the OpenStack Summit and Project Teams Gathering.
  • The TC charter which uses “Design Summit” and “Summit” interchangeably is no longer valid and requires change.
    • There was a focus on limiting the impact change to avoid the need to modify the Foundation bylaws [9].
    • PTL elections would continue to be organized around development cycle boundaries.
    • TC elections would continue to be organized relative to OpenStack Summit dates.
  • Full thread

Running Non-Devstack Jobs in Python Projects

  • Devstack is the common tool to deploy OpenStack in CI environments.
    • However, it doesn’t deploy OpenStack in production versus tools like Kolla, Fuel, TripleO, etc.
  • Things might (and did) break when deploying OpenStack outside of Devstack:
    • SSL was not tested. Some projects still don’t test with SSL enabled.
    • IPv6 is not tested everywhere.
    • Production scenarios with HA (HAproxy and/or Pacemaker) are not tested.
  • Proposal:
    • This is not about removing Devstack. The idea is to add more coverage in an interactive way.
    • Projects like TripleO and Heat have been added as CI jobs in the experimental pipeline.
    • A draft document about increasing coverage in different projects [10].
  • Finding a balance between enough testing and overusing infra resources is tricky.
    • Also anything that’s more complicated than unit tests has > 0% chance of failure.
  • Another proposal:
    • Running periodic testing and moving forward reference hashes everyday if tests pass.
      • Allows deployment tools to move forward automatically.
      • Quite close to master, but not tightly coupled into every change.
      • This is pretty much what the OpenStack-Ansible project does for its “integrated build”.
  • Full thread

 

[1] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-October/105299.html

[2] – http://blog.leafe.com/bias/

[3] – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/UX#Participate_in_a_usability_study_being_conducted_at_the_Barcelona_Summit.21

[4] – http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/api_wg/

[5] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/364460/

[6] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/383862/

[7] – https://www.openstack.org/ptg

[8] – https://www.openstack.org/summit/barcelona-2016/summit-schedule/events/17383/project-teams-gathering-101

[9] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/385951/

[10] – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bLg-uEGrQXyRZ-FuR6pf1WT4XN0-6MrlfqEShI7xMxg/edit#gid=0

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest September 24-30

Candidate Proposals for TC are now open

  • Candidate proposals for the Technical committee (6 positions) are open and will remain open until 2016-10-01, 23:45 UTC.
  • Candidacies must submit a text file to the openstack/election repository [1].
  • Candidates for the Technical Committee can be any foundation individual member, except the seven TC members who were elected for a one year seat in April [2].
  • The election will be held from October 3rd through to 23:45 October 8th.
  • The electorate are foundation individual members that are committers to one of the official programs projects [3] over the Mitaka-Newton timeframe (September 5, 2015 00:00 UTC to September 4, 2016 23:59 UTC).
  • Current accepted candidates [4]
  • Full thread

Release countdown for week R-0, 3-7 October

  • Focus: Final release week. Most project teams should be preparing for the summit in Barcelona.
  • General notes:
    • Release management team will tag the final Newton release on October 6th.
      • Project teams don’t have to do anything. The release management team will re-tag the commit used in the most recent release candidate listed in openstack/releases.
    • Projects not following the milestone model will not be re-tagged.
    • Cycle-trailing projects will be skipped until the trailing deadline.
  • Release actions
    • Projects not follow the milestone-based release model who want stable/newton branches created should talk to the release team about their needs. Unbranched projects include:
      • cloudkitty
      • fuel
      • monasca
      • openstackansible
      • senlin
      • solum
      • tripleo
  • Important dates:
    • Newton final release: October 6th
    • Newton cycle-trailing deadline: October 20th
    • Ocata Design Summit: October 24-28
  • Full thread

Removal of Security and OpenStackSalt Project Teams From the Big Tent (cont.)

  • The change to remove Astara from the big tent was approval by the TC [4].
  • The TC has appointed Piet Kruithof as PTL of the UX team [5].
  • Based on the thread discussion [6] and engagements of the team, the Security project team will be kept as is and Rob Clark continuing as PTL [7].
  • The OpenStackSalt team did not produce any deliverable within the Newton cycle. The removal was approved by the current Salt team PTL and the TC [8].
  • Full thread

 

[1] – http://governance.openstack.org/election/#how-to-submit-your-candidacy

[2] – https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TC_Elections_April_2016#Results

[3] – http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/projects.yaml?id=sept-2016-elections

[4] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/376609/

[5] – http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-09-27-20.01.html

[6] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-September/thread.html#104170

[7] – http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2016/tc.2016-09-27-20.01.html

[8] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/377906/

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest September 17-23

Announcing firehose.openstack.org

  • A MQTT based unified message bus for infra services.
  • This allows a single place to go for consuming messages of events from infra services.
  • Two interfaces for subscribing to topics:
    • MQTT protocol on the default port
    • Websockets over port 80
  • Launchpad and gerrit events are the only things currently sending message to firehose, but the plan is to expand this.
  • An example [1] of gerritbot on the consuming side, which has support for subscribing to gerrit event stream over MQTT.
  • A spec giving details on firehose [2].
  • Docs on firehose [3].
  • Full thread

Release countdown for week R-1, 26-30

  • Focus: All teams should be working on release-critical bugs before the final release.
  • General
    • 29th September is the deadline for the new release candidates or release from intermediary projects.
    • Quiet period to follow before the last release candidates on 6th October.
  • Release actions:
    • Projects not following the milestone-based release model who want a stable/newton branch created should talk to the release team.
    • Watch for translation patches and merge them quickly to ensure we have as many user-facing strings translated as possible in the release candidates.
      • If your project has already been branched, make sure those patches are applied to the stable branch.
    • Liaisons for projects with independent deliverables should import the release history by preparing patches to openstack/release.
  • Important Dates:
    • Newton last RC, 29 September
    • Newton final release, 6 October
    • Newton release schedule [4]
  • Full thread

Removal of Security and OpenStackSalt Project Teams From the Big Tent

  • The Security and OpenStackSalt projects are without PTLs. Projects leaderless default to the Technical Committee for decision of what to do with the project [5]. Majority of the Technical Committee has agreed to have these projects removed.
  • OpenStackSalt is a relatively new addition to the Big Tent, so if they got their act together, they could be reproposed.
  • We still need to care about security., and we still need a home for the vulnerability management team (VMT). The suggested way forward is to have the VMT apply to be its own official project team, and have security be a working group.
  • The Mitaka PTL for the Security mentions missing the election date, but provides some things the team has been working on:
    • Issuing Security Notes for Glance, Nova, Horizon, Bandit, Neutron and Barbican.
    • Updating the security guide (the book we wrote on securing OpenStack)
    • Hosting a midcycle and inducting new members
    • Supporting the VMT with several embargoed and complex vulnerabilities
    • Building up a security blog
    • Making OpenStack the biggest open source project to ever receive the Core
    • Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge
    • Working on the OpenStack Security Whitepaper
    • Developing CI security tooling such as Bandit
  • One of the Technical Committee members privately received information that explains why the security PTL was not on top of things. With ~60 teams around there will always be one of two that miss, but here we’re not sure it passes the bar of “non-alignment with the community” that would make the security team unfit to be an official OpenStack Team.
  • Full thread

[1] – http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/gerritbot/commit/?id=7c6e57983d499b16b3fabb864cf3b

[2] – http://specs.openstack.org/openstack-infra/infra-specs/specs/firehose.html

[3] – http://docs.openstack.org/infra/system-config/firehose.html

[4] – http://releases.openstack.org/newton/schedule.html

[5] – http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/open-community.html#technical-committee-and-ptl-elections

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest September 10-16

Nominations for OpenStack PTLs Are Now Open

  • Will remain open until September 18 23:45 UTC
  • Submit a text file to the openstack/election repository [1].
    • File name convention: $cycle_name/$project_name/$ircname.txt
  • In order to be an elgible candidate (and be allowed to vote) you need to have contributed an accepted patch to one of the program projects during the Mitaka-Newton timeframe.
  • Additional information [2].
  • Approved candidates [3]
  • Elections will start at September 19, 2016 00:00 UTC until September 25 23:45 UTC
  • Full thread

Ocata Design Summit – Proposed Slot Allocation

  • Proposed slot allocation for project teams at the Ocata design summit in Barcelona [4] based on requests current PTLs have made and adjusted for limit space available.
  • Kendall Nelson and Thierry will start laying out those sessions over the available rooms and time slots.
  • Communicated constraints (e.g. Manila not wanting to overlap with Cinder) should be communicated to Thierry asap.
  • If you don’t plan to use all of your slots, let Thierry know so they can be given to a team that needs them.
  • Start working with your team on content you’d like to cover at the summit and warm up those etherpads!
  • Full thread

OpenStack Principles

  • A set of OpenStack principles is proposed [5] to accurately capture existing tribal knowledge as a prerequisite for being able to have an open and productive discussions about changing it.
  • Last time majority of the Technical Committee were together, it was realized that there were a set of unspoken assumptions carried and used to judge things.
    • These are being captured to empower everyone to actually be able challenge and discuss them.
  • The principles were started by various TC members who have governance history and know these principles. This was in attempt to document this history to commonly asked questions. These are not by any means final, and the community should participate in discussing them.
  • Full thread

API Working Group News

  • Recently merged guidelines
    • URIs [6]
    • Links [7]
    • Version string being parsable [8]
  • Guidelines Under review
    • Add a warning about JSON expectations. [9]
  • Full thread

 

[1] – http://governance.openstack.org/election/#how-to-submit-your-candidacy

[2] – https://governance.openstack.org/election/

[3] – http://governance.openstack.org/election/#ocata-ptl-candidates

[4] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-September/103560.html

[5] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/5

[6] – https://review.openstack.org/322194

[7] – https://review.openstack.org/354266

[8] – https://review.openstack.org/346846

[9] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/364460/

 

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest July 23 to August 5

Equal Chances For All Projects

  • A proposal [1] in the OpenStack governance repository that aims to have everything across OpenStack be plugin based, or allow all projects access to the same internal APIs.
  • Some projects have plugin interfaces, but also have project integrations in tree. Makes it difficult to see what a plugin can, and should do.
  • With the big tent, we wanted to move to a flatter model, removing the old integrated status.
  • Examples:
    • Standard command line interface or UI for setting quotas, it’s hard for projects that aren’t Nova, Neutron or Cinder.
      • Quotas in Horizon for example are set in “admin → quotas”, but plugins can’t be in here.
      • OpenStack Client has “openstack quota set –instances 10” for example.
      • Steve Martinelli who contributes to OpenStack Client has verified that this is not by design, but lack of contributor resources).
    • Tempest plugins using unstable resources (e.g. setting up users, projects for running tests on). Projects in tree have the benefit of any change having to pass gate before it merges.
      • Specification to work towards addressing this [2].
      • The stable interface still needs work work in increasing what it exposes to plugins. This requires a bit of work and is prioritized by the QA team.
        • All tests in Tempest consume the stable interface.
      • Since a lot of plugins use the unstable interfaces, the QA team is attempting to maintain backwards compatibility until a stable version is available, which is not always an option.
      • Tempest.lib [3] is what’s considered the “stable interface”
  • Given the amount of in progress work for the examples given, there doesn’t seem a disagreement with the overall goal to warrant a global rule or policy.
  • An existing policy exists [4] with how horizontal teams should work with all projects.
  • Full thread and continued thread

Establishing Project-wide Goals

  • An outcome from the leadership training session that members of the Technical Committee participated in was setting community-wide goals for accomplishing specific technical tasks to get projects synced up.
  • There is a change to the governance repository [5] that sets the expectations of what makes a good goal and how teams are meant to approach working on them.
  • Two goals proposed:
    • Support Python 3.5 [6]
    • Switch to Oslo libraries [7]
  • The Technical Committee wants to set a reasonable number of small goals for a release. Not invasive top-down design mandates that teams would want to resist.
    • Teams could possibly have a good reason for not wanting or being able to fulfill a goal. It just needs to be documented and not result in being removed from the big tent.
  • Full thread

API Working Group News

  • Cinder is lookig into exposing resource capabilities.
  • Guidelines under review:
    • Beginning set of guidelines for URIs [10]
    • Add description of pagination parameters [11]
  • Full thread

Big Tent?

  • Should we consider the big tent is the right approach because of some noticed downsides:
    • Projects not working together because of fear of adding extra dependencies.
    • Reimplementing features, badly, instead of standardizing.
    • More projects created due to politics, not technical reasons.
    • Less cross-project communication.
    • Operator pain in assembling loose projects.
    • Architectural decisions made at individual project level.
  • Specific examples:
    • Magnum trying not to use Barbican.
    • Horizon discussions at the summit wanting to use Zaqar for updates instead of polling, but couldn’t depend on a non-widely deployed subsystem.
    • Incompatible virtual machine communication:
      • Sahara uses ssh, which doesn’t play well with tenant networks.
      • Trove uses rabbit for the guest agent to talk back to the controller.
  • The overall goal of big tent was to make the community more inclusive, and these issues pre-date big tent.
  • The only thing that can really force people to adopt a project is DefCore, but that comes with a major chicken and egg problem.
  • What’s not happening today is a common standard that everything can move towards. Clint Byrum’s proposal on an Architecture working group might be a way forward.
  • The Technical Committee is a balancing act of trying to provide this, but not interfere too much with a project in which members may not have specific experience with the project’s domain.
  • Sahara has had some success with integration with other projects.
    • Kilo/Liberty integrating with Heat for deploying clusters.
    • Liberty/Mitaka integrated Barbican.
    • Using Manila shares for datasources.
    • Liberty/Mitaka added Sahara support in OpenStack Client.
    • In progress, support with Designate.
  • Full thread

 

[1] – https://review.openstack.org/342366

[2] – http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/qa-specs/specs/tempest/client-manager-refactor.html

[3] – http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tempest/overview.html#library
[4] – http://governance.openstack.org/resolutions/20141202-project-structure-reform-spec.html#impact-for-horizontal-teams

[5] – https://review.openstack.org/349068

[6] – https://review.openstack.org/349069

[7] – https://review.openstack.org/349070

[8] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/306930/

[9] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/350310/

[10] – https://review.openstack.org/#/c/322194/

[11] – https://review.openstack.org/190743

Technical Committee Highlights July 17, 2016

This update is dedicated to our recent in-person training for the Technical Committee and additional community leaders.

Reflections on our Leadership Training Workshop

In mid-July 2016, 20 members of the OpenStack community including Technical Committee members current and past, PTLs current and past, other Community members and additional supporting facilitators met for a 2 day training class at ZingTrain in Ann Arbor Michigan. The ZingTrain team, joined by founder Ari Weinzweig, inspirational IT manager Tim Root, and various members of the Zingerman’s servant leaders shared a unique approach to business that matches OpenStack’s quite well.

Read more »