Archive for May, 2016

Lwood-20160529

May 30, 2016 at 23:06 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 23 May to 29 May 2016 for openstack-dev:

  • ~541 Messages (down about 7% relative to last week)
  • ~186 Unique threads (down about 4% relative to last week)

Pretty average sort of a week this one just past, traffic levels fairly steady on both openstack-dev and openstack-operators.

Notable Discussions – openstack-dev

Install Guide Naming

Lana Brindley seeks input from the community on what to call what was the Install Guide.  There’s a link in Lana’s post or you can cast your vote here.

Mentors needed in specific technical areas

Emily Hugenbruch notes that there are a dozen or so projects/areas for which the lightweight mentoring program sponsored by the Women of OpenStack still needs mentors.  If you’re across Cinder, Containers, Documentation, Glance, Keystone, Murano, Neutron, Nova, Ops, Searchlight, Telemetry, TripleO or Trove please consider getting involved in this excellent initiative.

Expiring old bugs/code reviews

A couple of threads around expiring old bugs and/or code reviews popped up on the openstack-dev list this week – largely in the context of housekeeping within projects.

Markus Zoeller drew attention to a script he’s written that expires old bug reports and seeks feedback on same.  He plans on using it on Nova in week R-13 and provides some of the rationale in this (Nova specific) post.

In a related effort Michael Still noted that he spent some time late last week abandoning old reviews from the Nova queue.

Tom Fifield thought to cross-post Markus’ thread to openstack-operators here which following some additional commentary from Markus led to an interesting sub-thread about how this might be perceived by folk in the Ops community and whether it might be better to use the “Expired” status for such bugs so as not to discourage future bug reporting.

Summit Evolution

Jonathan Bryce penned a short note to the list flagging the fact that he and Thierry would be hosting two online town hall meetings to discuss the changes to the OpenStack Summit.  The town halls have alas already passed but there is a useful FAQ/blog post here that is worthy of your time if Summits are a part of your calendar.

API Working Group’s Weekly Newsletter & Guidelines for review

Mike McCune posts an edition of the API Working Group newsletter – as far as I can tell a new initiative from the WG and a useful one at that!  In it he mentions recently merged guidelines (mentioned in last week’s Lwood), guidelines proposed for freeze, APIImpact reviews that are currently open and four guidelines currently under review.

It’s been my custom to flag the latter here in Lwood – will continue to do so for now, but do check out the WGs more comprehensive newsletter!

Where are your mid-cycle meetups ?

…is what Doug Hellmann asked and in so doing revealed one of two useful Wiki pages , thanks to Anita Kuno for the second one! OpenStack Sprints and OpenStack Virtual Sprints.

Can you help with Nova bug skimming

…so asks Markus Zoeller in this post – if you’ve some cycles spare and a bit of experience with bugs please take a look at what is involved :)

Notable Discussions – other OpenStack lists

Nothing particularly lept out on openstack-operators this week other than the thread on closing old bugs mentioned above.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s Events Page for a list of general events that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

PTL/Core nominations & changes

  • [Glance] [stable] Proposal to add Ian Cordasco to glance-stable-maint – Nikhil Komawar
  • [Keystone] Welcoming Rodrigo Duarte to core team – Morgan Fainberg/Steve Martinelli
  • [Tacker] Proposing Lin Cheng for tacker-horizon core team – Sridhar Ramaswamy

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Deep Purple (random tracks from The Platinum Collection and Perfect Strangers in its entirety) The Cars (Greatest Hits) amongst other tunes.

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Lwood-20160522

May 23, 2016 at 22:06 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 16 May to 22 May 2016 for openstack-dev:

  • ~584 Messages (down about 27% relative to last week)
  • ~194 Unique threads (down about 17% relative to last week)

After last week’s busiest week in Lwood history, a return to average traffic levels this week.  This week is the first where I’m actively keeping an eye on the rather quieter openstack-operators and openstack-community lists, not sure if this will be a long term change, we’ll see :)

Notable Discussions – openstack-dev

New API guidelines for review

Mike McCune writes that there are two new API guidelines ready for review by interested parties;

Request for Volunteer Trainers at PyCon Portland OR

David Flanders notes that the OpenStack Foundation has been given the opportunity to run a 90 minute training session for Application Developers at upcoming PyCon in Portland, OR.  As he rightly points “This is a great opportunity to road test the SDKs with our main user audience: application developers.”  If you’re interested in helping out, please contact David ASAP :)

A refresher on the global requirements process

Dims Srinivas provides a nice concise primer/reminder on how to work with the global requirements process as it currently stands and also notes there is a new team being formed to further streamline the process.

Languages vs. Scope of OpenStack (was The Monster Thread :)

In his initial post and a subsequent reply to the thread Thierry Carrez seeks to summarise the core issues brought to light by the recent thread on bringing golang in as a supported language for developing core OpenStack projects/code.  At the time of writing the thread is actually pretty short so you may want to read the various well thought through contributions yourself, but in essence;

Some projects in OpenStack are more low-level than others and require the sort of optimisation that can only be achieved in languages other than python.  It’s possibly helpful to think of language choice in these terms rather than the specific language itself.

A key question is where does OpenStack stop and the wider Open Source community start – it’s suggested that there’s a couple of ways to think of this;

  • The first way is community-centric: “anything produced by our community is OpenStack”
  • The other way is product-centric which leads to the idea that “lower-level pieces are OpenStack dependencies, rather than OpenStack itself”

Thierry posits that OpenStack dependencies can and should be developed in whatever language best suits the task at hand and so doing is relatively less costly from an OpenStack community standpoint.  Chris Dent notes that a similar way to make this distinction is whether the tool is useful and usable outside OpenStack.

Welcome Keystone to the World of Python 3

Morgan Fainberg notes with thanks to all involved that Keystone is now Python 3.4 compatible.  Nice work :)

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup – Part IV

No new posts with specific Summit wrap-ups in them but as mentioned last week I’ve now pulled together an as concise as I could make it summary of those posts in a blog post here. If there are further updates I’ll edit the post accordingly.

Notable Discussions – other OpenStack lists

As noted above, as of this week I’m trialing watching what’s happening on the openstack-operators and openstack-community lists as well…

Defining ‘users’, planning ops mid-cycles and related meetings

Over on the openstack-operators mailing list, Chris Morgan wrote a summary of one of the discussions at the Ops Meetup Team IRC meeting (!)  Of note and worth a quick read is the thoughtful definition of ‘users’ for the purposes of working out who should attend Operator Mid-Cycles.

In short the preference is for people involved in large scale public and private clouds to attend, more so than vendors of said clouds.  However individuals who work for large scale cloud vendors are encouraged to attend if they feel they can contribute, but are asked to wear their user rather than “promotional” hat (I paraphrase this latter).

In a related thread on openstack-operators Tom Fifield announces the meeting in question here and provides a neat summary a few days later in this post. The regular IRC meetings will occur every second Tyesday 1400h UTC in the #openstack-operators channel.

Update on Non-ATC Recognition

An email from Edgar Magana prompted the ever efficient Shamail Tahir to give a quick summary of where this process is up to.

I defer to Shamail’s email for the details but the desire to have a way to recognise contributors to OpenStack that don’t quite fit the Active Technical Contributor (ATC) definition has led to defining an Active User Contributor (AUC).  This process is ongoing but will provide a defined way of identifying folk that fit this mold and so their contribution to OpenStack more generally.

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Vulnerability Management Team changes

PTL/Core nominations & changes

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Nick Menza and OHM (Soultone Cymbals 10th Anniversary show, with condolences to Nick’s family, friends and fans), Robert Plant (Now and Zen), Rush (A Show of Hands) amongst other tunes.

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OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 Summary of Summaries

May 17, 2016 at 11:29 · Filed under OpenStack

Background

In the three editions of Lwood since the Austin Summit I provided a summary of mailing list posts where the writer had provided a summary of particular Design Summit Project sessions.

The list below is the combination of these in one (hopefully!) easily searchable list – saves trawling through each Lwood to find them :)

Project Summaries

Summaries posted to the OpenStack-Dev mailing list

Edits: 18/5/16 to add Assaf Muller’s Neutron summary (thanks to Boden Russell for pointing it out);

Etherpads

During the summit a colleague in the Product Working Group suggested that given the mailing list would be quiet, perhaps I could summarise all the Etherpads.  I looked into this and, well, doing it comprehensively is a task beyond my modest abilities and available time, but a few pointers might be of use;

Note that many of the per project summaries mentioned above that went to the OpenStack-dev mailing list link to the relevant Etherpad(s) too.

 

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Lwood-20160515

May 16, 2016 at 20:53 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 9 May to 15 May 2016:

  • ~800 Messages (up about 21% relative to last week)
  • ~233 Unique threads (up about 13% relative to last week)

Busiest week on the list since I started doing Lwood back at the end of June 2015.

Notable Discussions

Future of Cross Project Meetings

Mike Perez provides an update on the future of Cross Project (IRC) meetings.  Now that some momentum has been built the meetings will move to a little bit more of a self service model.

In particular Mike will no longer be announcing if the meetings are -not- occurring – instead folk interested in fixing a particular cross-project issue or feature should introduce a meeting following the process Mike outlines.

The expectation is that most CP meetings will now bring together a subset of projects rather than all of them.

Minor Tweak to automated release announcement emails

Doug Hellmann points out that a recently made change to the script that generates automated release announcements means that the subject line will now include “[new]” in place of the “[release]” tag.

Do you use wiki.openstack.org ? Please tell us more…

Thierry Carrez notes that there are moves afoot to better fine tune the way the Wiki operates and what it’s used for to make it more useful and less of a magnet for Spam.  To that end he asks people to take a few minutes and describe what/where/how they use the Wiki – write up their Wiki use cases in effect.  Please contribute :)

The Monster Thread…

No summary of OpenStack related goings on would be complete without noting a lengthy thread that kicked off a few weeks back and at the time of writing is still going.

The early part of the thread started here – a note from John Dickinson about the Swift team’s plans to code portions of Swift in the Go language (mentioned in last week’s Lwood).  At Thierry Carrez suggestion the process was commenced of seeking Technical Council approval to add Go to the list of supported languages for OpenStack.

That thread is up 141 messages and counting and has been, ahem, spirited in places.  Most of the discussion has been around the core question – using Go to code up parts of OpenStack as distinct from where a Go based API should be made available for OpenStack.  That latter seems to have firmly converged on No/Not Relevant.

The applicability/appropriateness of using Go (or other additional languages) at the core of OpenStack has been the predominant topic as well as (best I can tell) some pretty useful discussion about why Go is thought necessary (versus Python, coding critical sections in C or some such) etc.

Will be interesting to see how this thread pans out as it enters it’s second week and (possibly) second century of messages counts… :)

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup – Part III

While not quite as much traffic as last week, a healthy amount of post-Summit summary discourse on the list last week.

Since the summaries have already spanned three weeks worth of I’m pulling together a consolidated list which will go out later this week – you’ll be able to find it linked from here.

Summaries on List

My thanks to Thierry Carrez for a tweet noting his appreciation for these summaries and for some subsequent retweets – thus encouraged will do ‘em again next time :)

Upcoming OpenStack Events

A few midcycles being organised already

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

PTL/Core nominations & changes

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you by Santana (Sacred Fire), Thin Lizzy (Johnny The Fox), Tommy Emmanuel (The Journey),  Baby Animals (Early Warning, One Word), The Bottom 40 (Covering Happy by Pharrell Williams), Joe Walsh (Live From Daryl’s House: Funk 49-50 and Rocky Mountain Way) amongst other tunes.

 

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Lwood-20160508

May 10, 2016 at 17:02 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 2 May to 8 May 2016:

  • ~659 Messages (up about 102% relative to last week)
  • ~206 Unique threads (up about 94% relative to last week)

List traffic bounced back to almost exactly pre-summit levels this week past.

Notable Discussions

Swift News

John Dickinson penned a couple of posts to the list last week with some significant news for the Swift project;

In the first he flags the plans for the feature/hummingbird branch which amongst other things includes portions of Swift being written/re-written in go.  Perhaps most noteworthy is the integration of the feature/crypto work to provide at-rest encryption.

In the second he notes that the project is moving away from using the swift-specs repo to collate/debate and manage ideas for future work.  It has instead been replaced by a “shared brain dump” area – aka a Wiki page https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Swift/ideas.

Next Summit Locations

After Barcelona, we’re off to Boston in May 2017 and then Sydney in November 2017 :)

Recognising Glance Cores

Nikhil Komawar wrote an amusing and heartfelt thanks to the glance cores :)

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup – Part II

Once again a lot of post-Summit traffic on the list – here are some curated links to summaries posted to the mailing list and/or etherpads

Summaries on List

A bunch of summaries posted to the list this past week;

Incidentally – if you found the above useful, please shoot me a quick email as it’s a fairly labour intensive summary, one I’m happy to do if it’s actually useful for folk, might skip in future if not!

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Midcycle

A few midcycles being organised already;

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

  • [Cinder] Nominating Michał Dulko to Cinder Core – Sean McGinnis
  • [Tricircle] Proposing Shinobu Kinjo for Tricircle core reviewer – Joe Huang
  • [Openstack-ansible] Nominate Major Hayden for core in openstack-ansible-security – Travis Truman
  • [UX] OpenStack UX core nomination for Lana Brindley and Shamail Tahir – Peter Kruithof Jr.

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you from various points on the road between San Antonio, Texas, USA and Melbourne, Australia.  Been battling a flu so no tunes this time :)

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Lwood-20160501

May 3, 2016 at 07:12 · Filed under Lwood, OpenStack

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for the week just past. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 25 April to 1 May 2016:

  • ~325 Messages (down about 57% relative to last week)
  • ~106 Unique threads (down about 44% relative to last week)

No surprises – the week of the Austin Summit saw a significant drop in both the number of Messages and Threads on the list.

Notable Discussions

Changes to Summit format

While they weren’t discussed much this week on the dev list itself, there were at least two sessions at last week’s Summit which dug into proposed changes to the format of future Summits (Etherpads here and here).  I’ll attempt to summarise the state of play;

Thierry Carrez described the main change as “Split and Stagger” and provided a diagram that broadly illustrates the intent.

The Summit itself will retain the more end user/commercial sort of focus that has driven much of the schedule of the event and attracted the numerical majority of attendees in recent years.

So that the valuable work of end user to developer collaboration can continue at the Summit, specific Forums will be held to gather requirements, feedback, come up with priorities and the like.  It is these Forums where contributor/project teams will have some representation – PTLs and/or individual developers.  The exact nature of these Forums is being discussed.

The Summit Schedule and location will pretty much continue as it has been to date – North America then Europe/Asia, April-ish and October-ish.

The proposal then calls for Project Team Gatherings (PTGs) which will provide an opportunity for Project team(s) to get together and get work done.  These will be a “distributed” version of the design summit in so far as the co-location of projects will be a bit more ad-hoc.

Timing for the PTGs is expected to be the end of February and the end of August with the first two events probably being held in locations in North America to bootstrap things and establish baseline costs.  Thereafter the intent seems to be to follow a North America then rest of the world style split much like the Summit.

Within the PTG events themselves, the schedule will be somewhat loose – when projects are co-located all-hands style lunches will be the main schedule synchronisation point.  Teams are free to organise their own social events, possibly with a single major get together for the event when multiple projects are co-located.

While the final details are still being determined, it looks likely that participation in a PTG event will permit discounted or free attendance to the Summit, somewhat analogous to the arrangement for current ATCs.

Austin OpenStack Summit Wrapup

The big news for the week past was of course the Summit in Austin.  A well attended and well run event, I count myself fortunate to have been able to attend courtesy of my employer, Rackspace.

Other than co-presenting the session “And Now For Our Regularly Scheduled OpenStack Roadmap Update!” alongside my Product Working Group colleagues Carol Barrett and Nate Ziemann, I mostly stuck to the Design Summit sessions.  Summarising even this subset of the event would be an all but impossible task, but a few things that caught my attention.

Mailing List summaries

Most Project summaries end up in the various Etherpads (discussed below) but some good posts to the mailing list too;

Etherpads

A colleague in the Product Working Group suggested that given the mailing list would be quiet, perhaps I could summarise all the Etherpads.  I looked into this and, well, doing it comprehensively is a task beyond my modest abilities and available time, but a few pointers might be of use;

Want to test your code on a real 1,000 node cluster – for free ?

Check out the OSIC clusters.  Disclaimer – I work for Rackspace who along with Intel kicked off the project – but it’s pretty cool I reckon and is already proving quite a boon for OpenStack developers :)

OpenStack Health CI Result visualisation tool

Masayuki Igawa notes that the rather neat looking openstack-health project would welcome feedback on their initial release of this Visualisation tool for CI results.

Looks pretty slick – check it out :)

Upcoming OpenStack Events

Aside from a few posts relating to Summit specific (and so now passed) events, just the one event related thread this week;

Midcycle

Don’t forget the OpenStack Foundation’s comprehensive Events Page for a comprehensive list that is frequently updated.

People and Projects

Core nominations & changes

None noted this past week, apologies if there were and I missed them!

Further Reading & Miscellanea

Don’t forget these excellent sources of OpenStack news – most recent ones linked in each case

This edition of Lwood brought to you from various points on the road to San Antonio, Texas, USA. For no particular reason, no tunes this time :)

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