OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes

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We had an informal OpenStack meetup after the Opscode Summit in Seattle.

This turned out to be a major open cloud gab fest! In addition to Dell OpenStack leads (Greg and I), we had the Nova Project Technical Lead (PTL, Vish Ishaya, @vish), HP’s Cloud Architect (Alex Howells, @nixgeek), Opscode OpenStack cookbook master (Matt Ray, @mattray). We were joined by several other Chef Summit attendees with OpenStack interest including a pair of engineers from Spain.

We’d planned to demo using Knife-OpenStack against the Crowbar Diablo build.  Unfortunately, the knife-openstack is out of date (August 15th?!).  We need Keystone support.  Anyone up for that?

Highlights

There’s no way I can recapture everything that was said, but here are some highlights I jotted down the on the way home.

  • After the miss with Keystone and the Diablo release, solving the project dependency problem is an important problem. Vish talked at length about the ambiguity challenge of Keystone being required and also incubated. He said we were not formal enough around new projects even though we had dependencies on them. Future releases, new projects (specifically, Quantum) will not be allowed to be dependencies.
  • The focus for Essex is on quality and stability. The plan is for Essex to be a long-term supported (LTS) release tied to the Ubuntu LTS. That’s putting pressure on all the projects to ensure quality, lock features early, and avoid unproven dependencies.
  • There is a lot of activity around storage and companies are creating volume plug-ins for Nova. Vish said he knew of at least four.
  • Networking has a lot of activity. Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a core project in time for Essex. There was general agreement that Quantum is “the killer app” for OpenStack and will take cloud to the next level.  The Quantum Open vSwitch implementaiton is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.
  • HP has some serious cloud mojo going on. Alex talked about defects they have found and submitted fixes back to core. He also hinted about some interesting storage and networking IP that’s going into their OpenStack deployment. Based on his comments, I don’t expect those to become public so I’m going to limit my observations about them here.
  • We talked about hypervisors for a while. KVM and XenServer (via XAPI) were the primary topics. We did talk about LXE & OpenVZ as popular approaches too. Vish said that some of the XenServer work is using Xen Storage Manager to manage SAN images.
  • Vish is seeing a constant rise in committers. It’s hard to judge because some committers appear to be individuals acting on behalf of teams (10 to 20 people).

Note: cross posted on the OpenStack Blog.

Reminder: 12/8 Meetup @ Austin!

Missed this us in Seattle? Join us at the 12/8 OpenStack meetup in Austin co-hosted by Dell and Rackspace.

Based on our last meetup, it appears deployment is a hot topic, so we’ll kick off with that – bring your experiences, opinions, and thoughts! We’ll also open the floor to other OpenStack topics that would be discussed – open technical and business discussions – no commercials please!

We’ll also talk about organizing future OpenStack meet ups! If your company is interested in sponsoring a future meetup, find Joseph George at the meetup and he can work with you on details.

6 thoughts on “OpenStack Seattle Meetup 11/30 Notes”

  1. Hi Rob,

    Thanks for the notes on the meetup. Good to hear Quantum as discussed.

    As the PTL for Quantum, I’ve been pinged with questions based on this post, so I wanted a chance to clarify two things:

    1) Your note says “One disappointment: it appears that all Quantum implementations require some sort of licensed components to deploy. ”

    That would indeed be disappointing, but thankfully its not true. Do you know who said that? I’d like to correct the misunderstanding.

    There’s a full documentation on how to use Open vSwitch to implement Quantum (see http://docs.openstack.org/incubation/openstack-network/admin/content/ and http://openvswitch.org/openstack/documentation/), and I even sent a demo link out to the openstack list a while back (http://wiki.openstack.org/QuantumOVSDemo). Open vSwitch is completely open source and free. Some other plugins may require proprietary hardware and/or software, but there is definitely a (very) viable and completely open source option for Quantum networking.

    2) “Quantum has a lot of activity, but may not emerge as a full project in time for Essex.” This probably depends on your definition of “full project”. My understanding of OpenStack’s project process requires that a project be promoted to core prior to the start of a cycle for that project to be core as part of the cycle’s main release. At the end of the diablo cycle, Quantum applied to become an incubated project, which means it will be incubated for Essex. At the end of the Essex cycle, we plan to apply to be a core project, meaning that if we are accepted, we would be a core project for the F-series release. Its worth noting, however, that i know of many people planning on putting Quantum in production before then, which to me is the real indicator of a project’s maturity (regardless of whether it is technically “core” or not).

    Happy to chat with you more about Quantum, and again, I appreciate the shout-outs on your blog.

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  2. Pingback: OpenStack Quantum Update – what I got wrong and where it’s headed « Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

  3. Pingback: OpenStack Quantum Update – what I got wrong and where it’s headed « Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

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