Category Archives: Citrix

Why Governance Matters in Open Source: Discussing the OpenStack Foundation

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This post is part of my notes from the 2/1 Boston OpenStack meetup.

OpenStack Foundation

Your’s truly (Rob Hirschfeld) gave the presentation about the OpenStack Foundation.  To readers of this blog, it’s obvious that I’m a believer in the OpenStack mission; however, it’s not obvious how creating a foundation helps with that mission and why OpenStack needs its own. As one person at the meetup put it, “Why not? Every major project needs a foundation!”

Governance does not sound sexy compared to writing code and deploying clouds, but it’s very important to the success of the project.

Here are my notes without the poetic elocution I exuded during the meetup…

The basics:

  • What: Creating a neutral body to govern OpenStack. Rackspace has been leading OpenStack. This means that they own the copyrights, name and also pay the people who organize the community. They committed (to executives at Dell and others) that they would ultimately setup a standalone body to govern the project before the project was public and endorsed by those early partners. Dell (my employer), Citrix, Accenture and NASA were some of biggest names at the Austin conference launch.
  • Why: A neutral body is needed because a lot of companies are committing significant time and money to the project. They cannot risk their investments on Rackspace good will alone. This may mean many things. It could be they don’t like Rackspace direction or they feel that Rackspace is not investing enough.
  • When: Right now and over the next few releases.  You should give feedback right now on the OpenStack Foundations mission.  The actual foundation will take more time to establish because it requires legal work and funding commitments.
  • Who: The community – all stakeholders. This is important stuff! While trying to standup a financially independent Foundation, which requires moneys, the little guys are not left out. There is a clear realization and desire to enable independent developers and contributors and small players to have a seat at the table.
  • How Much: The amounts are unclear, but establishing a foundation will require a significant ongoing investment from highly involved and moneyed parties (Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, HP, Citrix, NTT, startups?, etc).  The funding will pay salaries for people dedicated to the community doing the things that I’ll discuss below.  Overall, the ROI for those investments must be clear!

The foundation does “governance.” But, what does that mean? Here is a list of vitally important work that the foundation is responsible for.

  • Branding – Protecting, certifying, and promoting the OpenStack brand is important because it ensures that “OpenStack” has a valuable and predictable meaning to contributors and users. A strong the brand also means a stronger temptation for people to abuse the brand by claiming compatibility, participation and integration.
  • API – Many would assume that the OpenStack API is the very heart of the project and there is merit to this position. As more and more OpenStack implementations emerge, it is essential that we have a body that can certify which implementations (and even which versions of the implementation!) are valid. This is a substantial value to the community because API integrity ensures project continuity and helps the ecosystem monetize the project. Note: my opinion differs from others here because I think we should favor API over implementation
  • Community – The OpenStack community is not an accident. It is the function of deliberate actions and choices made by Rackspace and supported by key contributors. That community requires virtual and physical places to coalesce and leaders to organize and manage those meeting places. The excellent conferences, wikis, blogs, media awareness, documentation and meetups are a product of consistent community management.
  • Arbitration – An open source community is a family and siblings do not always get along. Today, Rackspace must be very careful about balancing their own interests because they are like the oldest sibling playing the parent role – you can get away with it until something serious happens. We need a neutral party so that Rackspace can protect their own interests (alternate spin: because Rackspace protects their own interests at the expense of the community).
  • Leadership – OpenStack today is a collection of projects with individual leadership. We will increasingly need coordinated leadership as the number of projects and users increases. Centralized leadership is essential because the good of the project as a whole may mean sacrifices within individual projects. It may even mean that some projects chose to leave the OpenStack tent. Stewarding these challenges will require a new level of leadership.
  • Legal – This is a function of all the above but also something more. From a legal stand point, OpenStack be able to represent itself. There is a significant amount of intellectual property being created. It would be foolish to overlook that this property is valuable and needs adequate legal representation.

I used “vitally important” to describe the above items. Is that an exaggeration? Our goal is collaboration and that requires some infrastructure and rules to make it sustainable. We must have a foundation that encourages innovation (multiple implementations) and collaboration (discourages forking). Innovation and collaboration are the heartbeat of an open source project.

The foundation is vitally important because collaboration by competitors is fragile.

In addition to the core areas above, the foundation needs to handle routine tactical items such as:

  • Delivering on milestones & releases
  • Moving new subprojects into OpenStack
  • Electing and maintaining Project Policy Board
  • Electing and maintaining Project Technical Leads
  • Ensuring adherence and extensions to the current bylaws

At the end of the day, OpenStack monetization is the central value for the Foundation.

In order for the OpenStack project, and thus its foundation, to flourish, the contributors, ecosystem, sponsors and users of the project must be able to see a reasonable return (ROI) on their investment. I would love to believe that the foundation is allow about people banding together to solve important problems for the benefit of all; however, it is more realistic to embrace that we can both collaborate and profit simultaneously. Acknowledging the pragmatic self-interested view allows us to create the right incentives and processes as embodied by the OpenStack foundation.

OpenStack Deployments Abound at Austin Meetup (12/9)

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I was very impressed by the quality of discussion at the Deployment topic meeting for Austin OpenStack Meetup (#OSATX). Of the 45ish people attending, we had representations for at least 6 different OpenStack deployments (Dell, HP, ATT, Rackspace Internal, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef)!  Considering the scope of those deployments (several are aiming at 1000+ nodes), that’s a truly impressive accomplishment for such a young project.

Even with the depth of the discussion (notes below), we did not go into details on how individual OpenStack components are connected together.  The image my team at Dell uses is included below.  I also recommend reviewing Rackspace’s published reference architecture.

Figure 1 Diablo Software Architecture. Source Dell/OpenStack (cc w/ attribution)

Notes

Our deployment discussion was a round table so it is difficult to link statements back to individuals, but I was able to track companies (mostly).

  • HP
    • picked Ubuntu & KVM because they were the most vetted. They are also using Chef for deployment.
    • running Diablo 2, moving to Diablo Final & a flat network model. The network controller is a bottleneck. Their biggest scale issue is RabbitMQ.
    • is creating their own Nova Volume plugin for their block storage.
    • At this point, scale limits are due to simultaneous loading rather than total number of nodes.
    • The Nova node image cache can get corrupted without any notification or way to force a refresh – this defect is being addressed in Essex.
    • has setup availability zones are completely independent (500 node) systems. Expecting to converge them in the future.
  • Rackspace
    • is using the latest Ubuntu. Always stays current.
    • using Puppet to setup their cloud.
    • They are expecting to go live on Essex and are keeping their deployment on the Essex trunk. This is causing some extra work but they expect it to pay back by allowing them to get to production on Essex faster.
    • Deploying on XenServer
    • “Devs move fast, Ops not so much.”  Trying to not get behind.
  • Rackspace Cloud Builders (RCB) is running major releases being run through an automated test suite. The verified releases are being published to https://github.com/cloudbuilders (note: Crowbar is pulling our OpenStack bits from this repo).
  • Dell commented that our customers are using Crowbar primarily pilots – they are learning how to use OpenStack
    • Said they have >10 customer deployments pending
    • ATT is using OpenSource version of Crowbar
    • Need for Keystone and Dashboard were considered essential additions to Diablo
  • Hypervisors
    • KVM is considered the top one for now
    • Libvirt (which uses KVM) also supports LXE which people found to be interesting
    • XenServer via XAPI are also popular
    • No so much activity on ESX & HyperV
    • We talked about why some hypervisors are more popular – it’s about the node agent architecture of OpenStack.
  • Storage
    • NetApp via Nova Volume appears to be a popular block storage
  • Keystone / Dashboard
    • Customers want both together
    • Including keystone/dashboard was considered essential in Diablo. It was part of the reason why Diablo Final was delayed.
    • HP is not using dashboard
OpenStack API
  • Members of the Audience made comments that we need to deprecate the EC2 APIs (because it does not help OpenStack long term to maintain EC2 APIs over its own).  [1/5 Note: THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL POLICY, it is a reflection of what was discussed]
  • HP started on EC2 API but is moving to the OpenStack API

Meetup Housekeeping

  • Next meeting is Tuesday 1/10 and sponsored by SUSE (note: Tuesday is just for this January).  Topic TBD.
  • We’ve got sponsors for the next SIX meetups! Thanks for Dell (my employeer), Rackspace, HP, SUSE, Canonical and PuppetLabs for sponsoring.
  • We discussed topics for the next meetings (see the post image). We’re going to throw it to a vote for guidance.
  • The OSATX tag is also being used by Occupy San Antonio.  Enjoy the cross chatter!

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.

The OpenStack Rocket: How Citrix, Dell & Rackspace collaboration propels OpenStack

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OpenStack has grown amazingly and picked up serious corporate support in its first year.  Understanding how helps to explain why the initiative has legs and where adopters should invest.  While OpenStack has picked up a lot of industry partners, early participation by Dell and Citrix have been important to a meteoric trajectory.

So why are we (Dell) working so hard to light a fire under OpenStack?

To explain OpenStack support and momentum, we have to start with a self-reflective fact: Dell (my employer), Citrix and Rackspace are seeking to gain the dominate positions in their respective areas of “cloud.”  Individually, we have competitors in more entrenched positions for cloud silos in solutions, ecosystem, and hypervisor; however, our competitors are not acting in concertto maintain their position.   

OpenStack offers an opportunity for companies trying to gain market share to leverage the strengths of partners against their competitors.

The surprising aspect of OpenStack is how much better this collaboration is working in practice than in theory.  This, dare I say it, synergistic benefit comes to OpenStack from all the partners (Dell, Citrix, Rackspace and others) working together because:

  1. Real scale clouds are big and complex with a lot of moving pieces (too big for a single vendor)
  2. A vibrant ecosystem needs to see commercial commitment from large players (and avoids lock-in)
  3. Having alternatives drives innovation and manages costs (because differentiation is still needed)
  4. Interlocking expertise is required (because no vendor has all the pieces)
  5. Customer needs are diverse and changing (since cloud is accelerating the rate of innovation)

Today, three major cloud players are standing together to demonstrate commitment to the community.  This announcement is a foundation for the OpenStack ecosystem.  In the next few months, I expect to see more and more collaborative announcements as the community proves the value of working together.

By aligning around an open platform, we collectively out flank previously dominant players who choose to go it alone.  The technology is promising; however, the power of OpenStack flows mainly from the ecosystem that we are building together.