Archive for November, 2015

Lwood-20151129

November 30, 2015 at 23:59 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week ending 29th November 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 23rd to 29th November 2015 :

  • ~618 Messages (down about 2% relative to last week)
  • ~184 Threads (down about 3% relative to last week)

Traffic and threads steady despite holidays in some parts of the OpenStack world…

Notable Discussions

Work in progress: Grafana Dashboard for Bugs

Lwood-20151115 mentioned the recently launched http://grafana.openstack.org website and this week there’s a post and proof of concept mockup from Markus Zoeller outlining some work he’s doing towards a bug dashboard for OpenStack projects.  He’s actively soliciting feedback on the proposal and assistance – check it out and pitch in if you can :)

Encouraging first time contributors through special bug tags

Shamail Tahir kicks off an interesting thread about using bug tags to encourage first time contributors.  In essence the idea is to have a specific bug tag (probably a new one) that flags bugs as being suitable for first time contributors.  Some review logic could be added that would reject or at least -1 patch-sets that weren’t from a first time contributor.

A good bit of discussion followed including the suggestion that projects may wish to adopt this and take the idea a little further by having certain bugs defined this way that would also have additional comments in them to help the newcomer know where to go solution wise.

Tweaking the IRC Meeting Infrastructure

Tony Breeds puts forward a very cogent case for making some tweaks to the IRC channels used for OpenStack related meetings.  In short he proposes adding #openstack-meeting-5 and renaming #openstack-meeting-alt to #openstack-meeting-2 (which is what it effectively is anyways)

The proposal was well received it looks like the changes will proceed over the next week or two.

Mitaka 1 Milestone week November 30th – December 4th

Doug Hellmann reminds us that week R-18 (that’s this week) is the Mitaka 1 milestone deadline and provides a hand list of things that projects should be doing in light of this.

Moving to a trusting model ?

Morgan Fainberg puts forward a proposal to subtly alter the social policy that is applied to the permitted relationship between who writes code, who reviews code and who reviews/approves code for inclusion into OpenStack.

As it stands most projects prevent each of these three people being from the same company/organisation – the default is, in a sense, “distrust”.  In his post Adam Young provides a little further context around why the policy was worded the way it was – interestingly it’s as much about protecting employee developers from management pressure as anything else.

Morgan’s proposal is essentially that it be made “ok” for all three kinds of involvement (write code, review code, approve code) to be done by people from the same organisation/company with the acknowledgment that if it is felt this trust is broken, the changes can be reverted and the core status of those involved be reviewed.  a “trust” rather than “distrust” model.

While it’s a longish thread (27 messages at the time of writing) I’d commend it to all involved in OpenStack development and, equally people who manage folk that undertake this work.

Changes to the DocImpact flag

Lana Brindley writes of changes to the DocImpact flag – a flag used by developers to notify the Documentation team when a patch might cause a change in the docs.  

To quote Lana: “TL;DR: In the future, you will need to add a description whenever you add a DocImpact flag in your commit message.”  

The rationale is eminently sensible – providing a description will save the Docs folks having to dig quite so deeply to understand what the actually impact on the documentation will be.

More detail can be found in the original post or the spec.  Significantly, a Jenkins job will test for this and the job will fail if there is no description – so please bear this in mind for future patches.

Process change for closing bugs when patches merge

Doug Hellman advises of some changes to automated behaviours when patches containing “Closes-Bug” are merged.  Such patches will no longer automatically make the patch status update to “Fix Committed” as it’s seemingly been a bit of a wonky part of the release process.

Implications of this likely apply to all OpenStack developers, so if that’s you, please take a few minutes to read Doug’s post…

Releases vs Development Cycle explained in a single post

Succinctly put by Thierry Carrez in this email – worth a quick read but, frankly, tricky to summarise in Lwood in less than several paragraphs by which point you might as well have read his email :)

Midcycle dates and locations

A few more midcycle announcements and one poll this past week

People and Projects

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news :)

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Jeff Beck (Guitar Shop, There and Back, Wired) Jordan Rudess (Rhythm of Time), Herbie Hancock (Cantaloupe Island) amongst other excellent tunes.

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Lwood-20151122

November 23, 2015 at 23:48 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week ending 15th November 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 16th to 22nd November 2015 :

  • ~628 Messages (down about 8% relative to last week)
  • ~189 Threads (same as last week)

Traffic and threads steady…

Notable Discussions

Nova / Trusted Computing Pools related security notice (OSSN 0059)

Summary from the original security notice: “A trusted VM that has been launched earlier on a trusted host can still be powered on from the same host even after the trusted host is compromised.  More in the original post or the OSSN itself.

A reminder to projects about new “assert” tags

Over the last few months the TC defined a number of “assert” tags – a standardised way for projects to make certain assertions about their projects.  In his email Thierry Carrez reminds all concerned (basically PTLs and Project Cores) that the time is upon them to see if these tags should apply and if so to start using them.

In time this information will be added to that already displayed in the OpenStack Foundation’s Project Navigator hence the desire to get projects using these tags as soon as possible.  For operators and other non-developers, the use of these tags and endeavours like the Project Navigator promise to make the process of evaluating an OpenStack projects maturity a little simpler.

Vitrage – a Root Cause Analysis engine for OpenStack

Announced at the Mitaka Summit, a post to the list provided some more information on the Vitrage project – part of the broader Telemetry umbrella project for OpenStack,  The Vitrage developers would “like it to be the Openstack RCA (Root Cause Analysis) Engine for organizing, analyzing and expanding OpenStack alarms & events, yielding insights regarding the root cause of problems and deducing the existence of problems before they are directly detected.”

Noble goals and early days but a worthwhile and much needed set of functionality

What should the openstack-announce mailing list be ?

Tom Fifield kicked off a thread discussing what the best use of the mailing list is from herein.  Originally conceived as a low traffic read-only list he makes the point that with the addition of more (arguably) developer oriented content it’s become rather high traffic.  The concern being this appears to have put some folk off with them either filtering the list or unsubscribing – and so possibly missing the urgent content such as security notifications.

While there has been a little discussion since his first post on Friday input from a broad range of readers would be welcome.

Is booting a Linux VM important for certified OpenStack interoperability ?

On behalf of the DefCore Committee Egle Sigler asks for feedback on whether the ability to boot a Linux VM should be required for certified OpenStack interoperability.  A quick glance at the comments in the review cited suggests this is anything but a simple topic particularly once you consider containers and bare metal clouds in an environment…

Autoscaling both clusters and containers

Ryan Rossiter kicked off an interesting thread about autoscaling both containers and clusters. Essentially have the ability for a cluster to expand when the concentration of containers gets too high. Evidently there was some discussion about this in Tokyo with at least one demo being given using Senlin interfacing to Magnum to autoscale.

Developer Mailing List Digest

Originally a section within the OpenStack Community Newsletter, Mike Perez’ excellent openstack-dev digest is now available as a digest sent to the openstack-dev mailing list as well as being posted on the OpenStack Foundation’s blog.  I commend it to you if you’re after a deeper and/or more technical analysis than Lwood or other sources provide.  Here are the links to the Digest for November 7-13 and 14-20.

Discounted documentation changes

While the sprint in question is alas over at the time of writing, this post from Joshua Harlow about the Oslo projects virtual documentation sprint is too well written not to note :)

Midcycle dates and locations

A few more midcycle discussions this past week

  • [ironic] The Midcycle discussions from last week kicked off by Lucas Alvares seem to have settled on the idea of a virtual midcycle as proposed by Jim Rollenhagen
  • [manila] A survey for midcycle attendees/interested persons – Ben Swartzlander
  • [cinder] Mitaka Midcycle Sprint is on 26-29 January in North Carolina, USA – Sean McGinnis

Post Mitaka Summit Summaries and Priorities

A few more Summaries and Priority lists rolled in from the Mitaka Summit

People and Projects

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news :)

Closing on a lighter note – this edition of Lwood brought to you by Booker T Jones (Potato Hole & The Road From Memphis), Vinnie Moore (Aerial Visions), The String Contingent (Talk, TSC II), Steve Ray Vaughan (In Step), Tommy Emmanuel (Determination) amongst other excellent tunes.

 

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Lwood-20151115

November 16, 2015 at 22:44 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week ending 15th November 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 9th to 15th November 2015 :

  • ~683 Messages (basically flat relative to last week)
  • ~189 Threads (down 7% from last week)

Traffic and threads settling after the Mitaka lull then rush of the last few weeks!

Notable Discussions

Making Stable Maintenance it’s own OpenStack project team

This quite lengthy thread starts on Monday here and neatly summarised in a post on Friday makes the case for making stable maintenance its own discreet OpenStack project team.

Reasons in favour include the ability for a suitably empowered team to tackle new coordination tasks (across projects) and reinforcing branding – making stable more visible to organisations that may in turn be more inclined to commit resources.

To me the upsides of this far outweigh the minor downsides – as OpenStack continues to mature so will the expectation around stable releases and longer term support.

New API guidelines for review

There are three new API guidelines ready for review that will be merged on November 20th in the absence of any further feedback.  They are;

Telemetry and Ceilometer explained

Gord Chung wrote a nice summary explaining the newly introduced [telemetry] tag and accompanying project and how it relates to Ceilometer.  In short telemetry is a project that encapsulates various smaller projects, including Ceilometer that provide monitoring, alarming, data collection and resource storage style services.

OSprofiler is dead, long live OSprofiler

A tongue in cheek subject for a significant thread from Boris Pavlovic in which he outlines his work to write a new OSprofiler.  For the uninitiated this tool allows quite fine grained analysis of where time is spent doing various OpenStack requests.  Boris provides a link to a demo trace of a CLI command (nova boot) as an example.

While he acknowledges there is some work to be done there already appears to be quite widespread support for seeing this work integrated across the Mitaka release.

Nominations open for N and O names of OpenStack

Monty Taylor wrote to advise that nominations for the N and O releases of OpenStack were open – they are alas now closed at the time of writing this edition.

Fear not, you can still vote when the names are put forward for Community voting on 30th November.  If you’re curious the geographc regions in questions are “Texas Hill County” for the “N” release and “Catalonia” for “O” – both lovely places :)

Shout out for Nova API documentation contributions

Understand a bit about Nova ?  Able to explain it to others ?  Please consider contributing to the very important work to refresh the Nova API documentation as Alex Xu writes here.  There is also a virtual Sprint planned.

Cool graphs!

What’s better than OpenStack ?  Graphs of OpenStack of course! :)

Jokes aside, Paul Belanger noted the existence of a new site http://grafana.openstack.org which will, as it develops, allow various dashboards to be created.  Suggestions for what the community would like to see are sought, for now there is an example dashboard of Zuul data.

High Availability topic for openstack-dev

Adam Spiers noted that there is now a formal topic tag [HA] for High Availability related posts to the mailing list.  If you’re posting on HA related topics please use this tag to assist server-side and client-side maili filters in doing their thing.

Last sync from oslo-incubator

A good news thread with a practical bent this one – Dims noting that most of the code in oslo-incubator has now moved into oslo.* libraries (as intended) followed up by a post from Thierry pointing out it was three years to the day that oslo-incubator was first created.  Props for all involved in getting Oslo to where it is today.

Not keeping Juno around longer after all

Following up on the thread mentioned in last week’s Lwood, Tony Breeds summed up a fairly full couple of weeks discussion in this message noting that “… Juno is no more long live Kilo!”

Introducing Lwood

A colleague suggested I should flag a post about Lwood from within Lwood to see if the resulting recursion would collapse the Internet.  Silliness aside, as Thierry suggested I’ve added the blog version of Lwood to Planet Openstack.

Other Reading

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news :)

Post Mitaka Summit Summaries and Priorities

A few more Summaries and Priority lists rolled in from the Mitaka Summit

Midcycle dates and locations

A couple of midcycles (or lack thereof) were announced;

People and Projects

  • [tacker] Sripriya Seetharam nominated for Tacker core by Sridhar Ramaswamy
  • [oslo][taskflow] Greg Hill proposed for the taskflow-core team by Joshuah Harlow
  • [freezer] Proposal to add Pierre-Arthur Mathieu and Eldar Nugaev to freezer core by Marzi Fausto
  • [kolla] Proposing Michal Rostecki for Core Reviewer by Steve Dake
  • [vpnaas][neutron] Paul Michali advised he is stepping down from VPNaaS work to focus on other areas on Neutron

 

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Lwood-20151108

November 9, 2015 at 22:27 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week ending 8th November 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

The Mitaka Summit induced quiet spell last week was more than compensated for this week :)

Basic Stats for week 2nd to 8th November 2015 :

  • ~686 Messages (up about 155% from last week!)
  • ~204 Threads (up around 80% from last week)

Notable Discussions

Mitaka Release Schedule Published

Doug Hellman posted the Mitaka release schedule noting among other things there are only five weeks between Feature Freeze and Final Release instead of the usual six.

Exposing hypervisor/hardware details to users

Tony Breeds kicked off an interesting discussion about how best to expose hypervisor information to end users.  While seen by a few as a controversial idea there was far more assent than dissent and a way forward for something useable in ‘N’ and quite possibly Mitaka.

The most favoured approach seems to be to provide a capabilities API that abstracts the underlying information in hypervisor (or hardware) independent manner – a bit more heavy lifting to design and implement in the first instance, but a lot more future proof and allows a useful degree of hardware/hypervisor independence (the world isn’t all x86 after all…)

Changes to release process

Doug Hellman penned a few posts about changes to the release process for Mitaka.

The first dealt with communications – in summary the IRC channel for release related discussions has been renamed #openstack-release from it’s old name of #openstack-relmgr-office  Some behind the scenes tinkering should mean that anyone connecting to the old channel will be redirected.  The concept of “office hours” for the channel has now been removed – a recognition that most people have some form of scrollback or bot in use so that they can see messages posted while they weren’t logged in to the channel directly.

The second is more substantial – a move away from treating milestones as strict synchronisation points between projects, instead they are now intended to serve as reminders to the projects to have their own checkpoints.  Thus each project will be responsible for handling milestone tasks during the relevant weeks of the schedule, but at a big tent level there will no longer be an expectation to have all the tags and launchpad updates applied on the same day.

In a third email Doug outlines how similar changes are being made for stable releases and some in a fourth email, and finally in a fifth email some tools that might assist in keeping up.

Distributed lock managers at the Summit

Robert Collins posted a summary of conversations at the summit around adopting a common Distributed Lock Manager (DLM) While DLM is fairly deep developer level voodoo in most cases there are implications for operators as well as OpenStack moves in time to more unified solutions for this.

The plan put forward for now is to use an oslo abstraction layer named tooz – as Robert points out this doesn’t preclude using something else in special cases, but merely that they should be considered the exception not the norm.

It’s a longish thread that follows, but worth a read if DLM is on your radar and at the time of writing, still ongoing…

Oh and while you’re at it, take a moment to read this thread amusingly titled “[all][dlm] Zookeeper and openjdk, mythbusted” for a bit of comfort around the misconception that all of the above might mean you need to run a proprietary JVM…

Keep Juno alive for longer!

Tony Breeds kicked off a second thread worthy of a read – this one presenting a case for keeping the Juno release around for longer on the basis of its wide adoption and, as it would appear, a non-trivial number of customers that who are, for whatever reason, unable to contemplate a move to Kilo anytime soon.  

Post Mitaka Summit Summaries and Priorities

If you only have time to read one summary from the Summit, please consider making it this one by Doug Hellman as he neatly sets the stage for many themes that will be at the fore this cycle.

Beyond that, many projects and individuals posted summaries, recaps or priority lists following the Mitaka Summit and I have sought to link them all below, roughly in chronological order of their appearance on the list;

Midcycle dates and locations

A couple of midcycles (or lack thereof) were announced;

People and Projects

  • [rpm-packing] Alan Pevec and Jakub Ruzick were nominated for RPM packaging core by Haikel Guemar
  • [keystone] Steve Martinelli announced some changes to their cross project liaison personnel
  • [TripleO] Greg Haynes proposed Ian Weinand as core review on diskimage-builder
  • [ceilometer] Gord Chung proposed Rohit Jaiswal to be added to Ceilometer core
  • [networking-onos] Vikram Choudhary proposed Albert Dongfeng and Ramahjaneya Reddy Palleti as new cores for the networking-onos project
  • John Garbutt proposed adding Sylvain Bauza and Alex Xu to nova-core
  • [NFV][telco] Marc Koderer advised he would be stepping down from his TelcoWG core team membership
  • [neutron] After mooting such a move at the summit, Edgar Magana confirmed his decision to step down from Neutron core

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Lwood-20151101

November 2, 2015 at 09:55 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week ending 1st November 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

An even shorter Lwood this week than last – many people were at the Mitaka Summit in Tokyo which has reduced the amount of traffic dramatically.

Basic Stats for week 26th October to 1st November 2015 :

  • ~268 Messages (down about 36% from last week)
  • ~114 Threads (down about 49% from last week)

Notable Discussions

Midcycle dates and locations

There will likely be more of these announced/clarified during the coming week post Mitaka, but for now at least the Nova folk know where to be – Bristol, UK, 26 and 28 January. The announcement is here and a link to registration here.

Certificate Authority for openstack-ansible deployments

This thread, started by Major Hayden has been quietly percolating away and got, I think, some coverage at the summit too. It’s been suggested that the anchor project may have a role to play here as well.  Input is actively being sought from both the Ansible community but also from Openstack crypto folk.

People and Projects

  • Ian Cordasco wrote to say he would be stepping down from his involvement in Bandit, Glance, Ansible and Searchlight effective immediately.  A flurry of emails followed thanking Ian for his sustained and extensive contributions to OpenStack
  • Steve Dake announced that he will be stepping down from his role as a Magnum core reviewer.  He will continue to be involved with Kolla however.  A number of followup emails rightly thanked him for his work on the project
  • Denis Egorenko was proposed to Core for Puppet and with a quorum reached formally added
  • HenryG was added to the Neutron Drivers team

OpenStack-Cinder YouTube channel

Sean McGinnis announced the creation of a YouTube channel for Cinder – it will in time include tutorials and the like, for now will have Summit sessions posted.

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