10 ways to make OpenStack more Start-up Friendly [even more critical in wake of recent consolidation]

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Rob H

The Josh McKenty comment that OpenStack is “aggressively anti-startup” for Business Insider got me thinking and today’s news about IBM & Cisco acquiring startups Blue Box & Piston made me decide to early release this post.

I think there’s a general confusion about start-ups in OpenStack. Many of the early (and now acquired) start-ups were selling OpenStack the platform. Since OpenStack is community infrastructure, that’s a really hard place to differentiate. Unfortunately, there’s no material install base (yet) to create an ecosystem of start-ups on top of OpenStack.

The real question is not how to make OpenStack start-up friendly, but how to create a thriving system around OpenStack like Amazon and VMware have created.

That said, here’s my list of ten ways that OpenStack could be more start-up friendly:

Accept companies will have some closed tech – Many investors believe that companies need proprietary IP. An “open all things” company will have more trouble with investors.
Stop scoring commits as community currency – Small companies don’t show up in the OpenStack committer economy because they are 1) small and 2) working on their product upstream ahead of OpenStack upstream code.
Have start-up travel assistance – OpenStack demands a lot of travel and start-ups don’t have the funds to chase the world-wide summits and mid-cycles.
Embrace open projects outside of OpenStack governance – Not all companies want or need that type of governance for their start-up code base. That does not make them less valuable, it just makes them not ready yet.
Stop anointing ecosystem projects as OpenStack projects – Projects that are allowed into OpenStack get to grab to a megaphone even if they have minimal feature sets.
Be language neutral – Python is not the only language and start-ups need to make practical choices based on their objectives, staff and architecture.
Have a stable base – start-ups don’t have time to troubleshoot both their own product and OpenStack. Without core stability, it’s risky to add OpenStack as a product requirement.
Focus on interoperability – Start-ups don’t have time evangelize OpenStack. They need OpenStack to have large base of public and private installs because that creates an addressable market.
Limit big companies from making big pre-announcements – Start-ups primary advantage is being a first/fast mover. When OpenStack members make announcements of intention (generally without substance) it damages the market for start-ups. Normally corporate announcements are just noise but they are given credibility when they appear to come from the community.
Reduce the contribution tax and patch backlog – Start-ups must seek the path of least friction. If needed OpenStack code changes require a lot of work and time then they are unlikely to look for less expensive alternatives.

While I believe these items would help start-ups, they would have negative consequences for the large corporate contributors who have fashioned OpenStack into the type of project that supports their needs.

I’d love to what items you think I’ve overlooked or incorrectly added.

OpenStack Vancouver six observations: partners, metal, tents, defore, brands & breakage

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Rob H

As always, OpenStack conferences/summits are packed with talks and discussions. Any one of these six points could be a full post; however, I would rather post now and start discussions. Let me know what you think!

1. Partnering Everywhere – it’s froth, not milk

Everyone is partnering with everyone! It’s a good way to appear to cover more around and appear more open. Right now, I believe these partnerships are for show and very shallow. There will be blood when money is flowing and both partners want the lion’s share.

2. Metal is Hot! attention on Ironic & MaaS

Metal is very hot topic. No surprise, but I do not think that either MaaS or Ironic have the right architecture to deal with the real complexity of automating metal in a generalized way. The consequence is that they are limited and hard to operate.

Container talks were also very hot and I believe are ultimately disruptive. The very fact that all the container talks were overflowing is an indication of the challenges facing virtualization.

3. DefCore – Just in the Nick of Time

I think that the press and analysts were ready to proclaim that OpenStack was fragmenting and being unable to deliver the “one cloud, multiple vendors” vision. DefCore (presented as Interopability by Jonathan Bryce, DefCore shout out!) came in on the buzzer to buy us more time.

4. Big Tent Concerns – what is ecosystem & release?

Big Tent is shorthand for project governance changes that make it easier for new projects to become OpenStack projects and removes the concept of integrated releases. The exact definition is still a work in progress.

The top concerns I have are:

We cannot tell difference between community & ecosystem. We’re back to anointed projects because we’re now telling projects they have to join OpenStack to work with OpenStack.
We’re changing the definition of the release but have not defined how it will change. I acknowledge that continuous release is ideal but we’re confusing people again.

5. Brands are battling – will they destroy the city?

OpenStack is hard for startups – read the full post here. The short version is that big companies are taking up all the air.

While some are leading, others they are learning how to collaborate. Those new to open source are slow to trust and uncertain about where to invest. Unfortunately, we’ve created a visible contributions economy that does not reward doing the scut work so it’s no surprise that there are concerns that some of the bigger companies are free riding.

6. OpenStack is broken talks – could we reboot? no.

It’s a sign of OpenStack’s age that Bias, Termie and others suggested we need clean slate. Frankly, I think that OpenStack would be irrelevant by the time a rewrite was completed and it not helpful to suggest it.

What would I suggest? I’d promote a strong core (doing!), ensure big companies collaborate on roadmap (doing!) and stop having a single node install as gate and dev reference (I’d happily help use OCB for this with partners)

PS: Apparently Neutron is not broken.

I’m very excited about the “just give me a network” work to make Neutron duplicate Nova-Net functionality. Finally.

Ready State Foundation for OpenStack now includes Ceph Storage

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Rob H

For the Paris summit, the OpenCrowbar team delivered a PackStack demo that leveraged Crowbar’s ability to create a OpenStack ready state environment. For the Vancouver summit, we did something even bigger: we updated the OpenCrowbar Ceph workload.

Ceph is the leading open source block storage back-end for OpenStack; however, it’s tricky to install and few vendors invest the effort to hardware optimize their configuration. Like any foundation layer, configuration or performance errors in the storage layer will impact the entire system. Further, the Ceph infrastructure needs to be built before OpenStack is installed.

OpenCrowbar was designed to deploy platforms like Ceph. It has detailed knowledge of the physical infrastructure and sufficient orchestration to synchronize Ceph Mon cluster bring-up.

We are only at the start of the Ceph install journey. Today, you can use the open source components to bring up a Ceph cluster in a reliable way that works across hardware vendors. Much remains to optimize and tune this configuration to take advantage of SSDs, non-Centos environments and more.

We’d love to work with you to tune and extend this workload! Please join us in the OpenCrowbar community.

OpenSource.com Interview on DefCore, project management, and the future of OpenStack

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Rob H

Reposted from My Interview with RedHat’s OpenSource.com Jason Baker

Rob Hirschfeld has been involved with OpenStack since before the project was even officially formed, and so he brings a rich perspective as to the project’s history, its organization, and where it may be headed next. Recently, he has focused primarily on the physical infrastructure automation space, working with an an enterprise version of OpenCrowbar, an “API-driven metal” project which started as an OpenStack installer and moved to a generic workload underlay.

Rob is speaking on two panels at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, including DefCore 2015 and the State of OpenStack Project Management. We caught up with Rob to get updates about these two topics and what else lies ahead for OpenStack.

We asked you to help walk us through DefCore as it was being developed last year; just as a reminder, what is DefCore and why should people care about it?

DefCore creates a minimal definition for OpenStack vendors to help ensure interoperability and stability for the user community. While DefCore definitions apply only to vendors asking to use the OpenStack trademark, there are technical impacts on the tests and APIs that we select as required. We’ve worked hard to make sure the that selection process for picking “core” is transparent and fair.

What did the changes approved by the OpenStack Foundation membership earlier this year mean for DefCore?

The by-laws changes approved by the community were important to allow us to use DefCore more granular definition of Core. The previous by-laws were much more project focused. The changes allow us to select specific APIs and code components from a project as required instead of picking everything blindly. That allows projects to have both stable and new innovative components.

What can we expect from OpenStack’s structure and organization as we move forward towards the next release?

There are a lot of changes still to come. The technical leadership is making it easier to become part of the OpenStack code base. I’ve written about this change having potentially both positive and negative impacts on OpenStack to make it appear more like a suite of projects than a tightly integrate product. In many ways, DefCore helps vendors define OpenStack as a product as the community is expanding to include more capabilities. In my discussions, this is a good balance.

Switching gears a bit, you’ve also been heavily involved in the OpenStack project management working group. How has that group been progressing since they convened at the Paris Summit?

This group has made a lot of progress. We’ve seen non-board leadership step in and lead the group. That leadership is more organic and based in the companies that are directly contributing. I think that’s resulted in a lot of good ideas and documentation from the group. We’ll see some excellent results in Vancouver from them. It’s going to come back to the community and technical leadership to leverage that work. I think that’s the real test: we have to share ownership of direction between multiple perspectives. The first step in doing that is writing it down (which is what they have been doing).

Aside from the organization, let’s talk about the software itself. What are you hoping to see from the Liberty release?

I’m hoping to see adoption of Neutron accelerate. Having two network approaches makes it impossible to really have an interoperability story. That means Neutron has to be working technically, but also for operators and users. To be brutally honest, it also has to overcome its own reputation. If Neutron does not become the dominate choice, we are going to effectively have two major flavors of OpenStack. From the DefCore, vendor, or user perspective, that’s a very challenging position.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We’ve accomplished a lot together. In some ways, chasing too many targets is our biggest threat. I think that container workloads and orchestration are already being very disruptive for OpenStack. I’m hoping that we focus on delivering a stable core infrastructure. That’s why I’ve been working so hard on DefCore. Looking forward, there’s an increasing risk of trying to chase too many targets and losing the core of what users want.

This article is part of the Speaker Interview Series for OpenStack Summit Vancouver, a five-day conference for developers, users, and administrators of OpenStack Cloud Software.

Hidden costs of Cloud? No surprises, it’s still about complexity = people cost

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Rob H

Last week, Forbes and ZDnet posted articles discussing the cost of various cloud (451 source material behind wall) full of dollar per hour costs analysis. Their analysis talks about private infrastructure being an order of magnitude cheaper (yes, cheaper) to own than public cloud; however, the open source price advantages offered by OpenStack are swallowed by added cost of finding skilled operators and its lack of maturity.

At the end of the day, operational concerns are the differential factor.

The Magic 8 Cube

These articles get tied down into trying to normalize clouds to $/vm/hour analysis and buried the lead that the operational decisions about what contributes to cloud operational costs. I explored this a while back in my “magic 8 cube” series about six added management variations between public and private clouds.

In most cases, operations decisions is not just about cost – they factor in flexibility, stability and organizational readiness. From that perspective, the additional costs of public clouds and well-known stacks (VMware) are easily justified for smaller operations. Using alternatives means paying higher salaries and finding talent that requires larger scale to justify.

Operational complexity is a material cost that strongly detracts from new platforms (yes, OpenStack – we need to address this!)

Unfortunately, it’s hard for people building platforms to perceive the complexity experienced by people outside their community. We need to make sure that stability and operability are top line features because complexity adds a very real cost because it comes directly back to cost of operation.

In my thinking, the winners will be solutions that reduce BOTH cost and complexity. I’ve talked about that in the past and see the trend accelerating as more and more companies invest in ops automation.

OpenStack DefCore Community Review – TWO Sessions April 21 (agenda)

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Rob H

During the DefCore process, we’ve had regular community check points to review and discuss the latest materials from the committee. With the latest work on the official process and flurry of Guidelines, we’ve got a lot of concrete material to show.

To accommodate global participants, we’ll have TWO sessions (and record both):

April 21 8 am Central (1 pm UTC) https://join.me/874-029-687
April 21 8 pm Central (9 am Hong Kong) https://join.me/903-179-768

Consult the call etherpad for call in details and other material.

Planned Agenda:

Background on DefCore – very short 10 minutes
- short description
- why board process- where community
Interop AND Trademark – why it’s both – 5 minutes
Vendors AND Community – balancing the needs – 5 minutes
Mechanics
- testing & capabilities – 5 minutes
- self testing & certification – 5 minutes
- platform & components & trademark – 5 minutes
Quick overview of the the Process (to help w/ reviewers) – 15 minutes
How to get involved (Gerrit) – 5 minute

How Nebula shows why the OpenStack community (and OSS in general) should care about profits

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Rob H

In dog piling onto the news about early OpenStack provider Nebula’s demise, I’ll use their news to reinforce my belief that open communities need to ensure that funds are flowing to leaders and contributors. This is one of the reasons that I invest time in DefCore: having a clear base product definition helps create healthy vendors.

Open source software is not simply free VC funded projects. The industry needs a stable transparent supply chain of software to build on.

I am not asserting anything about Nebula’s business or model. To me, it is a single downward data point in my ongoing review of vendor health in the OpenStack community. OpenStack features and functions will not matter if vendors in the community cannot afford to sustain them.

For enterprises to rely on open source software supply chains, they need to make sure they are paying into the community. The simplest route to “paying in” is through vendors.

My OpenStack Super User Interview [cross-post]

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Rob H

This post of my interview for the OpenStack Super User site originally appeared there on 3/23 under the title “OpenStack at 10: different code, same collaboration?”

With over 15 years of cloud experience, Rob Hirschfeld also goes way back with OpenStack. His involvement dates to before it was officially founded and he was also one of the initial Board Members. In addition to his role as Individual Director, Hirschfeld currently chairs the DefCore committee. He’ll be speaking about DefCore at the upcoming Vancouver Summit with Alan Clark, Egle Sigler and Sean Roberts.

He talks to Superuser about the importance of patches, priorities for 2015 and why you should care about OpenStack vendors making money.

Superuser: You’ve been with the project since before it started, where do you hope it will be in five years?

In five years, I expect that nearly every line of code will have been replaced. The thing that will endure is the community governance and interaction models that we’re working out to ensure commercial collaboration.

[3/24 Added Clarification Note: I find humbled watching traditionally open-unfriendly corporations using OpenStack to learn how to become open source collaborations. Our governance choices will have long lasting ramifications in the industry.]

What is something that a lot of people don’t know about OpenStack?

It was essentially a “rewrite fork” of Eucalyptus created because they would not accept patches. That’s a cautionary tale about why accepting patches is essential that should not get lost from the history books.

Any thoughts on your first steps to the priorities you laid out in your candidacy profile?

I’ve already started to get DefCore into an execution phase with additional Board and Foundation leadership joining into the effort. We’ve set a very active schedule of meetings with two sub-committees running in parallel…It’s going to be a busy spring.

You say that the company you founded, RackN, is not creating an OpenStack product. How are you connected to the community?

RackN supports OpenCrowbar which provides a physical ready state infrastructure for scale platforms like OpenStack. We are very engaged in the community from below by helping make other distributions, vendors and operators successful.

What are the next steps to creating the “commercially successful ecosystem” you mentioned in your candidacy profile? What are the biggest obstacles to this?

We have to make stability and scale a critical feature. This will mean slowing features and new projects; however, I hear a lot of frustration that OpenStack is not focused on delivering a solid base.

Without a base, the vendors cannot build profitable products. Without profits, they cannot keep funding the project. This may be radical for an open project, but I think everyone needs to care more if vendors are making money.

What are some more persistent myths about the cloud?

That the word cloud really means anything. Everyone has their own definition. Mine is “infrastructure with an API” but I’d happily tell you it’s also about process and ops.

Who are your real-life heroes?

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) founders Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers. They executed a real vision about how to train for both competition and collaboration in the next generation of engineers. Their efforts in building the next generation of leaders really impact how we will should open source collaboration. That’s real innovation.

What do you hope to get out of the next summit?

First, I want to see vendors passing DefCore requirements. After that, I’d like to see the operators get more equal treatment and I’m hoping to spend more time working with them so they can create places to share knowledge.

What’s your favorite/most important OpenStack debate?

There are two. First, I think the API vs. implementation is a critical growth curve for OpenStack. We need to mature past being so implementation driven so we can have stand alone APIs.

Second, I think the “benevolent dictator” discussion is useful. Since we are never going to have one, we need a real discussion about how to define and defend project wide priorities in a meaningful way. Resolving both items is essential to our long-term viability.

OpenStack DefCore Process Draft Posted for Review [major milestone]

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Rob H

OpenStack DefCore Committee is looking for community feedback about the proposed DefCore Process.

March has been a month for OpenStack DefCore milestones. At the March Board meeting, we approved the first official DefCore Guideline (called DefCore 2015.03) and we are poised to commit the first DefCore Process draft.

Once this initial commit is approved by the DefCore Committee (expected at DefCore Scale.8 Meeting 3/25 @ 9 PT), we’ll be ready for broader input by the community using the standard OpenStack Gerrit review process. If you are not comfortable with Gerrit, we’ll take your input anyway that you want to give it except via telepathy (we’ve already got a lot on our minds).

Note: We’re also looking for input on the 2015.next Guideline targeted for 2015.04,

The DefCore Process documents the rules (who, what, when and where) that will govern how we create the DefCore Guidelines. By design, it has to be detailed and specific without adding complexity and confusion. The why of DefCore is all that work we did on principles that shape the process.

This process reflects nearly a year of gestation starting from the June 2014 DefCore face-to-face. Once of the notable recent refinements was to organize material into time phases and to be more specific about who is responsible for specific actions.

To make review easier, I’ve reposted the draft. Comments are welcome here and on the patch (and here after it lands).

DRAFT: OpenStack DefCore Process 2015A (reposted from OpenStack/DefCore)

This document describes the DefCore process required by the OpenStack bylaws and approved by the OpenStack Technical Committee and Board.

Expected Time line:

Time Frame	Milestone	Activities	Lead By
-3 months	S-3	“preliminary” draft (from current)	DefCore
-2 months	S-2	ID new Capabilities	Community
-1 month	S-1	Score capabilities	DefCore
Summit	S	“solid” draft	Community
Summit	S	Advisory items selected	DefCore
+1 month	S+1	self-testing	Vendors
+2 months	S+2	Test Flagging	DefCore
+3 months	S+3	Approve Guidance	Board

Note: DefCore may accelerate the process to correct errors and omissions.

Process Definition

Continue reading →

DefCore Process 9 Point Graphic balances Community, Vendor, Goverance

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Rob H

I’ve been working on the OpenStack DefCore process for nearly 3 years and our number #1 challenge remains how to explain it simply.

10 days ago, the DefCore committee met face-to-face in Austin to work on documenting the process that we want to follow (see Guidelines). As we codify DefCore, our top priority is getting community feedback and explaining the process without expecting everyone to read the actual nut-and-bytes of the process.

I think of it as writing the DefCore preamble: “We, the community, in order to form a more perfect cloud….”

defcore 9 points I don’t think we’ve reached that level of simplicity; however, we have managed to boil down our thinking into nine key points. I’m a big Tufte fan and believe that visualizations are essential to understanding complex topics. In my experience, it takes many many iterations with feedback to create excellent graphics. This triangle is my first workable pass.

An earlier version of these points were presented to the OpenStack board in December 2014 and we’ve been able to refine these during the latest DefCore community discussions.

We’re interested in hearing your opinions. Here are the current (2015-Feb-22) points:

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
1. MAPPING FEATURE AVAILABILITY: We are investing in gathering data driven and community involved feedback tools to engage the largest possible base for core decisions. This mapping information will be available to the community.
2. COMMUNITY CHOSEN CAPABILITIES : Going forward, we want a community process to create, cluster and describe capabilities. DefCore bootstrapped this process for Havana. Further, Capabilities are defined by tests in Tempest so test coverage gaps (like Keystone v2) translate into Core gaps that the community will fill by writing tests.
3. TESTS AS TRUTH: DefCore could expand in the future, but uses Tempest as the source of tests for now. Gaps in Test will result in DefCore gaps. We are hosting final documents in the Gerrit, using the OpenStack review process to ensure that we work within the community processes.
VENDOR
1. CLEAR RESULTS (PASS-FAIL): Vendors must pass all required core tests as defined by this process. There are no partial results. Passing additional tests is encouraged but not required.
2. VENDORS SELF-TEST: Companies are responsible for running tests and submitting to the Foundation for validation against the DefCore criteria. Approved vendor reports will be available for the community.
3. APPEAL PROCESS / FLAGGED TESTS: There is a “safety valve” for vendors to deal with test scenarios that are currently difficult to recreate in the field. We expect flags to be temporary.
GOVERNANCE
1. SCORING BASED ON TRANSPARENT PROCESS (DEFCORE): The 2015 by-laws change requires the Board and TC to agree to a process by which the Foundation can hold OpenStack Vendors accountable for their use of the trademarks.
2. BOARD IS FINAL AUTHORITY: The Board is responsible for approving the final artifacts based on the recommendations. By having a transparent process, community input is expected in advance of that approval.
3. TIMELY GUIDANCE: The process is time sensitive. There’s a need for the Board to produce DefCore guidance in a timely way after each release and then feed that result into the next cycle. The guidance is expected to be drafted for review at each Summit and then approved at the Board meeting three months after the draft is posted.

Rob Hirschfeld

On Computing, Containers, Cloud & Tech Culture

Category Archives: OpenStack