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;

• [ironic] Summit Recap and Mitaka priorities (Jim Rollenhagen)
• [app-catalog] Community App Catalog in Tokyo (Christopher Aedo)
• [glance] Summary from the summit (Flavio Percoco) and Priorities (Malini Bhandaru)
• [tacker] Summary from the Mitaka summit and priorities (Sridhar Ramaswarmy)
• [cinder] Mitaka Design Summit Recap (Sean McGinnis)
• [telemetry][ceilometer][aodh][gnocchi] Tokyo summit roundup (Gord Chung)
• [designate] Mitaka Summit Notes (Graham Hayes)
• [senlin] Mitaka summit meetup – a summary (Qiming Teng)
• [nova] Mitaka Priorities and Deadlines (John Garbutt)
• [kolla] Summary from Mitaka Summit for Kolla (Paul Bourke)
• [congress] Summit recap (Tim Hinrichs)
• [swift] Tokyo summit recap (John Dickinson)
• [zaqar] OpenStack Tokyo Summit Summary (Fei Long Wang)
• [kuryr] Design Summit etherpad (Gal Sagie)

Midcycle dates and locations

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

• [telemetry][ceilometer][aodh][gnocchi] no in person midcycle (Gord Chung)
• [cinder] mid-cycle planning survey (Duncan Thomas)
• [neutron] wait and see if one is needed (paraphrased) (Armando M)
• [glance] No mid-cycle meetup for Mitaka (Flavio Percoco)

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

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.

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for 25th October 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

A bit of a shorter Lwood this week as the Mitaka Summit in Tokyo seems to have reduced the amount of Lwood-relevant traffic.

Basic Stats for week 19th to 25th October 2015 :

• ~499 Messages (down about 19% from last week)
• ~186 Threads (up about 2% from last week)

Notable Discussions

User Survey Results are out

Tom Fifield writes that the results of the most recent OpenStack user survey are now available here and it is, truly, compelling reading.  No matter what your involvement with OpenStack this is worthy of your time to go through and read.  Your humble correspondent will be taking a second pass at it right after I click send on this Lwood :)

New Stackalytics goodness

Ilya Shakhat notes that Stackalytics 0.9 is now up and running, a mixture of some neat new functionality as well as compatibility with upcoming infra changes (such as working with Gerrit 2.9+) Head over and check it out :)

Release Freeze until after Summit

Doug Hellman made note of the fact that barring anything unforeseen, there will be a freeze on new releases until after tne Summit – November 2nd.

OpenStack-HA IRC Channel

After some discussion with the -infra team, Adam Spiers points out there is now an IRC channel specifically for High Availability related discussions.

A new project – Watcher

Antoine Cabot announced the Watcher project on Wednesday last week – a project that seemingly makes use of data streamed from Ceilometer (and so isn’t, as I understand it querying the database) and allows this information to be used to trigger events with the aim of optimising resource usage.  Seems pretty neat and follows a presentation made at the Vancouver summit.

Release Notifications

A new section for Lwood, will see how useful/practical it proves to be – a wrapup of the weeks release/version bump notifications…

• Ironic 4.2.1 released
• Ironic-Inspector 2.2.2 released
• Astara (formerly Akanda) release 7.0.0 note this is the correct URL for Launchpad.

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for 18th October 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 12th to 18th October 2015 :

• ~619 Messages (up about 4% from last week)
• ~182 Threads (up about 20% from last week)

Notable Discussions

Glance related security notice (OSSN 0057)

This post outlines the contents of OSSN 0057 – a DoS attack on Glance that can cause database resource depletion by continually requesting the creation of zero sized images.

Release communications for Mitaka

Doug Hellman sent an email to the PTLs and openstack-dev outlining plans to ensure more methodical and consistent release management for the Mitaka cycle.  In particular he implores PTLs, project release liaison people and other relevant folk to ensure they have email handling set up such that anything with the [release] topic gets flagged. Further details on the process will follow.

Tweaks to release request process

A later post from Doug outlines the first of these changes – some tweaks around what is expected for library versioning and constraint updates and a reminder that these new policies will be enforced starting this week.  More here.

Establishing Release and Documentation Liaisons for Mitaka

Rounding out our trifecta of Mitaka release related discussions, a few more words from Doug Hellman asking projects to find people to act as Release Liaisons as described here.

Lana Brindley chimed in with a timely reminder to the projects to consider who can be their Documentation Liaison as well.

Etherpads for Mitaka Design Summit

Thierry Carrez noted that there is now a page on the Wiki to collect the etherpads for the Summit.  Please check yours is listed if appropriate!

A thread on the Scheduler continues…

Flagged in last week’s Lwood at the better part of 64 messages for that week, the thread Ed Leafe kicked off is still going strong with about another 45 posts.  Ed provides some interesting comments here that somewhat sums up the conversation thus far.

The thread has been covering all sorts of things; Cassandra, numpy, scalability, how many nodes are a lot etc. etc. so it has moved beyond the original premise which was suggesting a way to allow experimentation with the Nova scheduler.  Still worth a read :)

OpenStack Infra moving to Gerrit 2.11

Zaro posted on behalf of the Infra team to announce plans to upgrade to Gerrit 2.11 (currently 2.8) shortly after the Mitaka summit.  Judging by the thread that followed, a very popular plan!  More details in the original post.

Magnum PTL announced

Somehow I missed the announcement in the week before last that the Magnum PTL election was concluded with Adrian Otto re-elected to the role.  My apologies for the oversight and congrats to Adrian!

More on the informal performance/large deployments group

As mentioned back in Lwood-20150927, Dina Belova kicked off a discussion on setting up an informal team to work specifically on OpenStack performance issues in large deployments.  It’s been confirmed that a session has been set aside for this group at the Tokyo Summit.

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for 11th October 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 5th to 11th October 2015 :

• ~596 Messages (up about 4% from last week)
• ~174 Threads (down about 12% from last week)

Notable Discussions

TC Elections

Voting in the TC Elections wrapped up during the week past and the results were announced shortly thereafter.

The successful candidates were Anne Gentle (Rackspace), Doug Hellman (HP), Monty Taylor (IBM, OpenStack Foundation), Sean Dague (also of HP), Russell Bryant (Red Hat) and Kyle Mestery (also HP, I think).

A reminder you can read a little more about the candidates on this OpenStack Wiki page.

A little Launchpad housekeeping

The recent shifts on/off daylight savings time in many parts of the world make this a timely (sorry) request to please consider updating your timezone information in Launchpad to make scheduling meetings a bit easier.

Reviews requested for openstack-ansible-security

Major Hayden put out a request for interested and able folk to review the work thus far.  He points out that many are fairly easy to do – a small task and some doco and so an excellent place to start learning to do reviews.

Two new API Guidelines ready for Cross Project Review

…and they’ll be merged come October 16.  From the original post the titles are “Adds an API documentation guideline document” and “Add http400 for nonexistent resource”

Recording little everyday OpenStack successes

In this post Thierry Carrez announces a nice little initative to capture little moments of joy and success – the things seemingly not worth a blog post or mailing list thread, but cool none the less.  The post and subsequent thread has a bit more background but in essence the idea is to use the tag #success in the OpenStack channel of your choice and a bot will take it and record it on this Wiki page.  Neato!

A thread on the Scheduler

At the better part of 64 messages and counting, the thread Ed Leafe kicked off is one of the longer on the list for quite some time.  An interesting read, it follows up a post he made back in July (and mentioned in Lwood 20150719) suggesting a way to allow experimentation with the Nova scheduler by doing the work out of tree temporarily.

If Nova or general compute architectural discussions are your area of interest, a good one to read.  Also a nice example of (predominantly) postive collaboration by a wide range of OpenStack developers :)

Mitaka Design Summit Schedule up

Thierry concludes a thread from two weeks back in this post noting that the Mitaka Design Summit schedule is now up on sched.org

Keeping track of Ceilometer extensions

Gord Chung noted that there is now a specific section in the Ceilometer Wiki for tracking extensions to Ceilometer (such as plugins to support telemetry on different systems for example) that aren’t part of the main project itself.

Some interesting “orphaned” code – Attribute Mapping GUI for Horizon

An unusual if not unprecedented circumstance – University student creates a Useful Thing™ then gets a job that prevents them from finishing it…  In this case some GUI code for creating/editing attributes for Keystone.  After a little discourse on list the code was put up on review.openstack.org as a work in progress and review sought, or even better, someone to carry on from where the good seeming work has left off.

Refactoring the Glance image import process

Just a single post that refers back to a conversation started in September on priorities.  The resultant spec is here and the call has been made for feedback, particularly from folk that use rather than contribute to glance.

Recurring bug squash day for keystone

A well received call to have a weekly bug squash day for Keystone.  If you have the skills, please pitch in :)

PTL Election Analysis

As reported previously, the PTL elections took place at the end of September.  I did a little analysis of the employers of the various PTLs – this based on their company attribution in Stackalytics.  Note at the time of writing the Magnum PTL election is still underway.

In order of number of PTLs we have HP (9), Mirantis (7), Rackspace (6), IBM (4), Redhat (3) and Intel (2).  The remaining 11 PTLs are all from different companies.  

I didn’t have ready access to historical data, but will be able to prepare a perspective after the next PTL election.  Below you’ll find the results tabulated and, in a first for Lwood, a graph!

Introduction

Welcome to Last week on OpenStack Dev (“Lwood”) for 4th October 2015. For more background on Lwood, please refer here.

Basic Stats for week 28th September to 4th October 2015 :

• ~573 Messages (up about 2% from last week)
• ~174 Threads (up about 13% from last week)

Notable Discussions

TC Elections

The TC Elections for six positions are underway, closing date for voting for those eligible is 9th October 2015 23:59:59 – UTC time and date.  If you’re able to vote you should already have received an email with a voting link from Tristan Cacqueray (on/around 3rd October if mine is anything to go by). You can read Tristan’s announcement post here and a some thought provoking observations about being an ATC from Flavio Percoco.

A quick scan suggests that all 19 candidates have posted supporting information to the dev mailing list or you can refer to the OpenStack Wiki page that has all the relevant information.

Discussion about new testing for OpenStack Compatible mark

This post was flagged in last week’s Lwood to little fanfare.  A bit of discussion started up about it in the week past including a post about related discussions among the Neutron team.

To recap the overall thread discusses new requirements that come into force in November whereby the OpenStack Foundation will require vendors requesting “OpenStack Compatible” storage driver licenses to start passing the Cinder third-party integration tests.  This all part of a broader initiative to better use the OpenStack brand to enforce better interoperability.

Asserting that a project follows the base deprecation policy

A timely reminder that following the most recent TC meeting there is now a definition for a standard base deprecation policy for OpenStack projects. PTLs are requested to review the definition and if appropriate propose a change adding that tag to their project.  Full details in the OP including a reminder that it’s ok, particularly for “younger” projects to not make such an attestation.

Proposed Mitaka release schedule

From Tierry Carrez a post noting that the proposed schedule for Mitaka is now available here.  By all accounts no surprises – similar to previous releases and even an acknowledgement of some time off over the Christmas/New Year period.

Infra needs Gerrit developers

A call out to anyone able to help out the Infra team with work on Gerrit. As it is rather wryly noted, Gerrit forms a key part of the CI infrastructure for OpenStack so it’s in everyone’s best interests to have Gerrit be as awesome and reliable as possible.  Please consider!

Tokyo Summit Track/Room/Time Allocations

For anyone attending the Tokyo Summit, a further post on track, room and time allocations. Feedback requested if there are any glaring issues.

A request for feedback from the OpenStack UX team

Most PTLs would already be across this but it’s none the less encouraging to see the UX team reaching out requesting feedback on personas to facilitate creating user stories and the like.  Original post is here.