This post is a follow-up from the April 12 Austin OpenStack (OSTAX) meeting.
Overall, we had a good meeting with strong attendance. Unlike last meeting, the attendees were less OpenStack experienced; however, many us worked for companies that are members of the OpenStack Foundation. I work for Dell (a gold sponsor).
Rather than posting before the summit, I’ve scored my summit experiences against our poll to see if our priorities were met. (note: Thanks to Greg Althaus for additional input in the commentary)
| Issue | OSTAX Rank | Results from Summit | Outlook |
| Stability vs. Features Prioritization & Processes | 68% | This was a major thread throughout the summit in multiple sessions. My feeling of the dialog was the stability (including continuous integration) was a core requirement. | Excellent |
| API vs Code. What does it mean to be “OpenStack” | 68% | This is a good news / bad news story. As OpenStack Compute gets split into more and more independent pieces; their interactions will require a well-defined externalized API. The continuing issue is that these APIs will be still driven by the python-based reference implementation. In some regards, APIs will emerge and be better codified. Newer PTLs bring additional perspective and beliefs around APIs vs Code. | Mixed |
| Operations focus: making OpenStack easy to deploy and manage | 68% | This was a major topic with many sessions dedicated to operationalizing OpenStack. Special focus was given to shared Puppet and Chef deployment code.There were specific sessions around High Availability and what that means. From this session, consensus was built for infrastructure HA documentation using Pacemaker for Folsom. There was NOT consensus for instance-level HA. | Trending Positive |
| Documentation Standards and improved user guides | 59% | Anne Gentle is championing this and had a presence throughout the summit. | Strong |
| Driving for Hypervisor feature parity (KVM, Xen and also VMware/HyperV) | 57% | While Libvirt/KVM continues to dominate. Citrix was present to support XenServer and Microsoft made commitments for (returning) HyperV support. | Uneven Progress |
| Improving collaboration (get beyond listserv & IRC) so information is more persistent | 56% | I was not involved in discussions around this topic. | No Comment |
| Have more operations discussion / design at the Design Summit | 54% | We had many sessions about operations tooling but little about specific considerations for operations. Perhaps we need to take a step towards shared deployment scripts. | Action with Fragmentation |
| Nova-volume to split out and/or more API driven (less integrated) | 51% | This was a major topic in multiple sessions. There are a number of parties that are signing up to create block storage as a stand-alone project.Cinder will be the block storage service. Not just good sessions were held, but good plans were built for constructing and improving the project. The project will start as a clone of the current nova project with unique chunks living in Cinder and common pieces of both projects move to the openstack-common project.The Cinder working group is very cross company and had a strong desire to maintain a minimal specification (current API replacement) with only one additional feature required for Folsom (boot from volume). The boot from volume feature is really a Nova feature, but the Cinder team will most likely drive it to ensure Cinder/Nova separation. | Surprisingly Active |
| OpenStack on Windows & HyperV | 50% | This is two topics. Microsoft is committing for OpenStack to support HyperV as a Nova Compute node. Running the rest of the suite on Windows does not appear to be a priority (or practical?) | Promising Potential |
| Orchestration. More projects like Donabe? | 48% | There are a number of ecosystem projects emerging. Now that Essex has emerged as a solid release, I expect to see an acceleration projects. At this time, they are still incubating.There was also the acknowledgement that there are two levels of orchestration, instance orchestration (think nova scheduler) and workload orchestration (think Donabe or VAPP). Instance orchestration had many good discussions and improvements suggested and started (host aggregates, filter scheduler extensions, …) | Building Slowly |
| Making Nova into smaller components | 46% | This was a thread in several sessions and it part of the ongoing stabilization work to improve collaboration. One important component of this is moving common code into a shared library. | In process, needs focus |
| How should invitations be handed out to Summit? Was the last process to Dev focused? | 40% | I was not aware of any discussion of this at the summit. Looks like we all need to go out and commit some code! | No Comment |
Overall, I think that the Austin Stacker priorities were well positioned at the Design Summit.
After the split, I’m posted the twitter feed from the meeting (in post order):
- Rick Ashford @darthzen: Hanging at the @OpenStack Meetup. #OSATX (@ Tech Ranch)http://4sq.com/IrnTcy
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: #osatx meeting about to start
- Lee Thompson @stagr_lee: Thanks #suse for pizza breakfast at #osatx meetup. Too busy all day to eat.
- Joseph George @jbgeorge: Austin OpenStack meetup kicking off – up first, Rick Ashford from Suse! #openstack #Cloud #osatx http://pic.twitter.com/25OE9ucQ
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: Sweet! #osatx #suse going platinum in #openstack foundation, plus#crowbar and #PostgreSQL and more.
- Chris Anderson @CAnderson24: Great presentation by #suse at #OSATX. With #hpcloud #dell
- Rick Ashford @darthzen: Lots of first-timers at the @OpenStack Meetup tonight. Great to see it spreading and reaching new users! #OSATX
- Joseph George @jbgeorge: Lots of first timers at Austin OpenStack meetup – excellent! Welcome!#osatx
- Rick Ashford @darthzen: Nice job by @zehicle introducing the new folks to the OpenStack terminology and architecture. #OSATX
- Anne Gentle @annegentle: Install OpenStack Essex release with http://devstack.org: git clone, then do “git checkout -b stable/essex origin/stable/essex” #OSATX
- Chris Anderson @CAnderson24: Just left #osatx awesome collab from competing companies toward#OpenStack future growth #HPCloud #dell #Rackspace #Citrix #suse#cloud +
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: #osatx lots of interest in block storage for #openstack
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: #osatx is there interest in a live stream from to meetup? Could do w Skype for small group
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: #osatx looks like half the attendees tonight are employees by#openstack foundation members. Very wide distribution of companies joined
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: #osatx deep discussion about meaning and impact of #openstackfoundation
- · Open: EYES on #OccupyWallSt. #Sleepful protest under police attack.http://ustre.am/FdJZ/1 #OWS #OCAM #OATX #OHTX #OO #OPDX#OSATX #OATL #Occto
- Kit O’Connell @KitOConnell: Debt & Civilization (on @firedoglake). #Austerity throughout #History.http://is.gd/loXegC #OWS #OATX #OO #OSF #OccTo #OHTX#OSATX #OPDX
- Rob Hirschfeld @zehicle: RT @sparkycollier: @zehicle wish I could have made #OSATXtonight! < you’re booked you as a speaker for 5/10,http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/60452812/
Rob Hirschfeld 
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