It’s been a long time, and a lot of summits, since I posted how OpenStack was ready for workloads (back in Cactus!).  We’ve seen remarkable growth of both the platform technology and the community surrounding it.  So much growth that now we’re struggling to define “what is core” for the project and I’m proud be on the Foundation Board helping to lead that charge.

So what’s exciting in Havana?

There’s a lot I am excited about in the latest OpenStack release.

Complete Split of Compute / Storage / Network services

In the beginning, OpenStack IaaS was one service (Nova).  We’ve been breaking that monolith into distinct concerns (Compute, Network, Storage) for the last several releases and I think Havana is the first release where all of the three of the services are robust enough to take production workloads.

This is a major milestone for OpenStack because knowledge that the APIs were changing inhibited adoption.

ENABLING TECH INTEGRATION: Docker & Ceph

We’ve been hanging out with the Ceph and Docker teams, so you can expect to see some interesting.  These two are proof of the a fallacy that only OpenStack projects are critical to OpenStack because neither of these technologies are moving under the official OpenStack umbrella.  I am looking forward to seeing both have dramatic impacts in how cloud deployments.

Docker promises to make Linux Containers (LXC) more portable and easier to use.  This paravirtualization approach provides near bear metal performance without compromising VM portability.  More importantly, you can oversubscribe LXC much more than VMs.  This allows you to dramatically improve system utilization and unlocks some other interesting quality of service tricks.

Ceph is showing signs of becoming the scale out storage king.  Beyond its solid data dispersion algorithm, a key aspect of its mojo is that is delivers both block and object storage.  I’ve seen a lot of interest in consolidating both types of storage into a single service.  Ceph delivers on that plus performance and cost.  It’s a real winner.

Crowbar Integration & High Availability Configuration!

We’ve been making amazing strides in the Crowbar + OpenStack integration!  As usual, we’re planning our zero day community build (on the “Roxy” branch) to get people started thinking about operationalizing OpenStack.   This is going to be especially interesting because we’re introducing it first on Crowbar 1 with plans to quickly migrate to Crowbar 2 where we can leverage the attribute injection pattern that OpenStack cookbooks also use.  Ultimately, we expect those efforts to converge.  The fact that Dell is putting reference implementations of HA deployment best practices into the open community is a major win for OpenStack.

Tests, Tests, Tests & Continuous Delivery

OpenStack continue to drive higher standards for reviews, integration and testing.  I’m especially excited to the volume and activity around our review system (although backlogs in reviews are challenges).  In addition, the community continues to invest in the test suites like the Tempest project.  These are direct benefits to operators beyond simple code quality.  Our team uses Tempest to baseline field deployments.  This means that OpenStack test suites help validate live deployments, not just lab configurations.

We achieve a greater level of quality when we gate code check-ins on tests that matter to real deployments.   In fact, that premise is the basis for our “what is core” process.  It also means that more operators can choose to deploy OpenStack continuously from trunk (which I consider to be a best practice scale ops).

Where did we fall short?

With growth comes challenges, Havana is most complex release yet.  The number of projects that are part the OpenStack integrated release family continues to expand.  While these new projects show the powerful innovation engine at work with OpenStack, they also make the project larger and more difficult to comprehend (especially for n00bs).  We continue to invest in Crowbar as a way to serve the community by making OpenStack more accessible and providing open best practices.

We are still struggling to resolve questions about interoperability (defining core should help) and portability.  We spent a lot of time at the last two summits on interoperability, but I don’t feel like we are much closer than before.  Hopefully, progress on Core will break the log jam.

Looking ahead to Ice House?

I and many leaders from Dell will be at the Ice House Summit in Hong Kong listening and learning.

The top of my list is the family of XXaaS services (Database aaS, Load Balanacer aaS, Firewall aaS, etc) that have appeared.  I’m a firm believer that clouds are more than compute+network+storage.  With a stable core, OpenStack is ready to expand into essential platform services.

If you are at the summit, please join Dell (my employer) and Intel for the OpenStack Summit Welcome Reception (RSVP!) kickoff networking and social event on Tuesday November 5, 2013 from 6:30 – 8:30pm at the SkyBistro in the SkyCity Marriott.   My teammate, Kamesh Pemmaraju, has a complete list of all Dell the panels and events.