Category Archives: OpenStack

OpenStack Quantum Update – what I got wrong and where it’s headed

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I’m glad to acknowledge that I incorrectly reported the OpenStack Quantum project would require licensed components for implementation!   I fully stand behind Quantum as being OpenStack’s “killer app” and am happy to post more information about it here.

Side note: My team at Dell is starting to get Crowbar community pings about collaboration on a Quantum barclamp.  Yes, we are interested!

This updates comes via Dan Wendlandt from Nicira who pointed out my error in the Seattle Meetup notes (you can read his comment on that post).  Rather than summarize his information, I’ll let Dan talk for himself…

Dan’s comments about open source Quantum implementation:

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 [Dan] 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.

Dan’s comments about Quantum OpenStack project status in the D-E-F release train:

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 [Dan] knows of many people planning on putting Quantum in production before then, which is the real indicator of a project’s maturity (regardless of whether it is technically “core” or not).

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.

Seattle meetup on 11/30 (will bring massive laptops for OpenStack, Hadoop & Crowbar demos)

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After Greg Althaus and I are done attending the sold out Opcode Community Summit (11/29-30), Opscode has offered to let us have an informal meetup at Opscode HQ from 6:30 to 8pm on 11/30.  I’ve proposed this as an official Seattle OpenStack Meetup (waiting on confirmation from @heckj).

We’re not limiting the agenda to OpenStack!  We’ll happily talk about Hadoop, Crowbar, Opscode or any other cloud technology that’s on your mind.  For 90 minutes, we’re offering Cloud Geeking as a Service (CGaaS).

Not in Seattle?  Never fear!  You can hook up with other members of my team at Dell in Boston on 11/29 & Austin 12/8.

Crowbar community support and 111111 sprint plan

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The Dell Crowbar team is working to improve road map transparency. In the last few weeks, the Crowbar community has become more active on our lists, testing builds, and helping with documentation.

We love the engagement and continue to make supporting the list a priority.

Participation in Crowbar, OpenStack and Hadoop has been exceeding our expectations and we’re working to implement more community support and process. Thank you!!!

Our next steps:

  1. I’ve committed to post sprint plans and summary pages (this is the first)
  2. New Crowbar Twitter account
  3. I’m going to setup feature voting on the Crowbar Facebook page (like to vote)
  4. Continue to work the listserv and videos. We need help converting those to documentation on the crowbar wiki.
  5. Formalize collaborator agreements – we’re working with legal on this
  6. Exploring the option of a barclamp certification program and Crowbar support
  7. Moving to a gated trunk model for internal commits to improve quality
  8. Implementing a continuous integration system that includes core and barclamps. This will be part of our open source components.

We are working towards the 1.2 release (Beta 1) . That release is focused on supporting OpenStack but includes enhancements for upgrades, Hadoop, and additional OS support.

Our Sprint 111111 plan.

Source: Crowbar Wiki: [[sprint 111111]]

  • Theme: OpenStack Diablo Final release candidate.
  • Core Work: Refine Deployment for Nova, Glance, Nova Dashboard (horizon), keystone, swift
  • New additions: mySQL barclamp, Nova HA networking, kong
  • Crowbar internals: expose error states for proposals, allow packages to be included with barclamps to make upgrades easier, barclamp group pages
  • Operating system: added CentOS
  • Documentation: we’ve split the user guides into distinct books so Crowbar, OpenStack, and Hadoop each have their own user guide.
  • Pending action: expose the Hadoop barclamps
  • OS note: OpenStack is being tested (at Dell) against Ubuntu 10.10 only. Hadoop was tested against RHEL 5.7 and we expect it to work against CentOS also.

Rackspace unveils OpenStack reference architecture & private cloud offering

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Yesterday, Rackspace Cloud Builders unveiled both their open reference architecture (RA) and a private cloud offering (on GigaOM) based upon the RA.  The RA (which is well aligned with our Dell OpenStack RA) does a good job laying out the different aspects of an OpenStack deployment.  It also calls for the use of Dell C6100 servers and the open source version of Crowbar.

The Rackspace RA and Crowbar deployment barclamps share the same objective: sharing of best practices for OpenStack operations.

Over the last 12+ months, my team at Dell has had the opportunity to work with many customers on OpenStack deployment designs.  While no two of these are identical, they do share many similarities.  We are pleased to collaborate with Rackspace and others on capturing these practices as operational code (or “opscode” if you want a reference to the Chef cookbooks that are an intrinsic part of Crowbar’s architecture).

In our customer interactions, we hear clearly that Crowbar must remain flexible and ready to adapt to both customer on-site requirements and evolution within the OpenStack code base.  You are also telling us that there is a broader application space for Crowbar and we are listening to that too.

I believe that it will take some time for the community and markets to process today’s Rackspace announcements.  Rackspace is showing strong leadership in both sharing information and commercialization around OpenStack.  Both of these actions will drive responses from the community members.

Talk with Team Crowbar! Online 11/8, Austin 11/15, Boston 11/29 & 11/29 & Seattle 11/30

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My team at Dell has been getting a great response from our community about Crowbar. Thanks! We’re actively working a rock solid OpenStack deployment that will raise the bar on ease of deploy and drive operational excellence.

We have also heard that we need to improve access to the team; consequently, I’m delighted to announce a long list of places and dates where you can access us online AND in person.

Here’s the list:

Or in a calendar view:

Sun Mon Tuesday Wed Thursday Fri Sat
11/8 Online
Crowbar Chat
11/15 Austin
Cloud User
11/29 Boston
OpenStack Meetup		 11/30 Seattle
Crowbar Drinks TBD
12/6 Boston
Opscode BoaF		 12/8 Austin
OpenStack Meetup

Notes from 10/27 OpenStack Austin Meetup (via Stephen Spector)

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Stephen Spector (now a Dell Services employee!) gave me permission to repost his excellent notes from the first OpenStack Austin (#OSATX) Meetup Group.

Here are his notes:

[Stephen] wanted to update everyone on the Austin OpenStack Meetup last night at the Austin TechRanch sponsored by Joseph and Rob (that’s me!) of the Dell OpenStack team (I think I got that right?). You can find all the tweets from the event at https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23osatx as we created a new hashtag for tweeting during the event, #osatx.

Here are some highlights from the event:

  • About 60 or so attendees with a good amount from Dell (Barton George, Logan McCloud)and Rackspace, Opscode (Matt Ray), Puppet Labs, SUSE talked about their OpenStack commitment (http://t.co/bBnIO7xv), and Ubuntu folks as well
  • Jon Dickinson who is the Project Technical Lead for Swift (Object Storage) was there and presented information on the current Swift offering; It is interesting to note that Swift releases continuously when most of OpenStack releases during the 6 month development cycle like Nova (Compute)
  • Stephen and Jim Plamondon from Rackspace presented information on the overall community and talked about the announcement yesterday from Internap about their Compute public cloud and the information on the MercadoLibre 600 Node Compute cloud running their business:

“With 58 million users of MercadoLibre.com and growing rapidly, we need to provide our teams instant access to computing resources without heavy administrative layers. With OpenStack, our internal users can instantly provision what they need without having to wait for a system administrator,” said Alejandro Comisario, Infrastructure Senior Engineer, MercadoLibre, the largest online trading platform in Latin America. “With our success running OpenStack Compute in production, we plan to roll OpenStack Diablo out more broadly across the company, and have appreciated the community support in this venture, especially through the OpenStack Forums, where we are also global moderators.”

  • Discussion on the OpenStack API Issue which is a significant open issue at this time – should OpenStack focus on creating an API specification and then let multiple implementations of that API move forward or build 1 implementation of the API as official OpenStack (see my post for more on this).
  • Greg Althaus gave a demo of the Nova Dashboard
  • Future Meetings
  • Three organizations have offered to help host (pizza $ and TechRanch space $) but we always need more!  You can offer to sponsor via the meetup site.
  • There will be future OpenStack Austin Meetups so sign up for the group and you’ll be notified automatically.

Pictures…

Continue reading →

OpenStack: Five Challenges & Conference Observations

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I was part of the Dell contingent at the OpenStack design conference earlier in the month.  The conference opened a new chapter for the project because the number of contributing companies reached critical mass.  That means that the core committers are no longer employed by just one or two entities; instead, there are more moneyed interests rubbing elbows and figuring out how to collaborate.

From my perspective (from interview with @Cote ), this changed the tone of the conference from more future looking to pragmatic.

That does not mean that everything is sunshine and rainbows for OpenStack clouds, there are real issues to be resolved.  IMHO, the top issues for OpenStack are:

  1. API implementation vs specification
  2. Building up coverage on continuous integration
  3. Ensuring that we can deploy consistently in multi-node systems
  4. Getting contributions from new members
  5. Figuring out which projects are core, satellite, missing or junk.  [xref 2014 DefCore]

Of these issues, I’ve been reconsidering my position favoring API via Implementation over specification (past position).  This has been a subject of debate on my team at Dell and I like Greg Althaus’ succinct articulation of the problem with implementation driven API: “it is not fair.”  This also ends up being a branding issues for OpenStack because governance needs to figure out which is a “real” OpenStack cloud deployment that can use the brand.  Does it have to be 100% of the source?  What about extensions?  What if it uses the API with an alternate implementation?

Of the other issues, most are related to maturity.  I think #2 needs pressure by and commitment from the larger players (Dell very much included).  Crowbar and the deployment blueprint is our answer #3.  Shouting the “don’t fork it up” chorus from the roof tops addresses contributions while #5 will require some strong governance and inevitably create some hurt feelings.

Addressing OpenStack API equality: rethinking API via implementation over specification

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This post is an extension of my post about OpenStack’s top 5 challenges from my perspective working on Dell’s OpenStack team.  This issue has been the subject of much public debate on the OpenStack lists, at the conference and online (Wilamuna & Shuttleworth).  So far, I have held back from the community discussion because I think both sides are being well represented by active contributors to trunk.

I have been, and remain, convinced that a key to OpenStack success as a cloud API is having a proven scale implementation; however, we need to find a compromise between implementation and specification.

The community needs code that specifies an API and offers an implementation backing that API.  OpenStack has been building an API by implementing the backing functionality (instead of vice versa).  This ordering is important because the best APIs are based on doing real work not by trying to anticipate potential needs.  I’m also a fan of implementation driven API because it emerges quickly.  That does not mean it’s all wild west and cowboy coding.  OpenStack has the concept of API extensions; consequently, its possible to offer new services in a safe way allowing new features to literally surface overnight.

Unfortunately, API solely via implementation risks being fragile, unpredictable, and unfair. 

It is fragile because the scope is reflected by what the implementors choose to support.  They often either expose internals or restrict capabilities in ways that a leading with design specification would not.  This same challenge makes them less predictable because the API may change as the implementation progresses or become locked into exposing internals when downstream consumers depend on exposed functions.

I am ready to forgive fragile and unpredictable, but unfair may prove to be expensive for the OpenStack community.

Here’s the problem: there is more than on right way to solve a problem.  The benefit of an API is that it allows multiple implementations to emerge and prove their benefits.  We’ve seen many cases where, even with a weak API, a later implementation is the one that carries the standard (I’m thinking browsers here).  When your API is too bound to implementation it locks out alternatives that expand your market.  It makes it unfair to innovators who come to the party in the second wave.

I think that it is possible to find a COMPROMISE between API implementation and specification; however, it takes a lot of maturity to make that work.  First, it requires the implementors to slow down and write definitions outside of their implementation.  Second, it requires implementors to emotionally decouple from their code and accept other API implementations.  Of course, a dose of test driven design (TDD) and continuous integration (CI) discipline does not hurt either.

I’m interested in hearing more opinions about this… come to the 10/27 OpenStack meetup to discuss and/or please comment!

Austin OpenStack Cloud Meetup: Thursday 10/27 6:30 PM at TechRanch Austin

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OpenStack Enthusiasts, you are OFFICIALLY INVITED to Austin’s first post-Diablo OpenStack community event.

Dell is sponsoring an Austin OpenStack Meet Up help connect the Austin community around OpenStack and open source clouds!

Link: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/37908242/

We’ve got members of the Rackspace Cloud Builders Training team in town and Dell’s own Crowbar team attending.  We’re planning to do OpenStack demos and talk about the project in detail – and we’ll have plenty of pizza and sodas to keep the cloud juices flowing.

This is a great way to learn about the OpenStack cloud project and meet other people who are developing/deploying the hottest open source cloud around.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD – we’re trying to make this inaugural OpenStack meetup a big success!

See you there,

Joseph @jbgeorge George & Rob @Zehicle Hirschfeld