THIS POST IS #6 IN A SERIES ABOUT “WHAT IS CORE.”

As we take the OpenStack Core discussion to a larger audience, I was asked to create the summary version the discussion points.  We needed a quick visual way to understand how these consensus statements interconnect and help provide context.  To address this need, I based it on a refined 10 core positions to create the following OpenStack Core flowchart.

The flow diagram below is grouped into three main areas: core definition (green), technical requirements (blue), and testing impacts (orange).

1. Core Definition (green) walks through the fundamental scope and premise of the “what is core” discussion.  We are looking for the essential OpenStack: the parts that everyone needs and nothing more.  While OpenStack can be something much larger, core lives at the heart of the use-case venn diagram.  It’s the magical ice cream flavor that everyone loves like Triple Unicorn Rainbow Crunch.
2. Technical Requirements (blue) covers some of the most contentious parts of the dialog.  This section states the expectation that OpenStack™ implementations must use parts the OpenStack code (you can’t just provide a compatible API).  It goes further to expect that we will maintain an open reference implementation and also identify places where parts of the code can be substituted with alternate implementations.  Examples of alternate implementations are plug-ins, API extensions, different hypervisors, and alternate libraries.
3. Testing Impacts (orange) reviews some of the important new thinking around Core.  These points focus on the use of OpenStack community tests (e.g.: Tempest) to validate the total code base.  We expect users to be able to self-administer these tests or rely on an external validation.  Either way, we do not expect all tests to pass for all configurations; instead, the Foundation will identify a subset of the tests as required or must-pass.  The current thinking is that these must-pass tests will become the effective definition of OpenStack™ Core.

I hope this helps connect the dots on the core discussions so far.

I’d like to clean-up the positions to match the flow chart and cross reference.  Stay tuned!  This flowchart is a work in process – updates and suggestions are welcome!

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