Tag Archives: Ironic

OpenStack Sydney Summit

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Sydney BannerThe week started dreary and cold, the coldest spring November in a decade, but turned out beautiful as the week went on. It made it hard to stay inside and focus on OpenStack for the three short days of Summit down under in Sydney. I planned an extra day upfront to clear my head of any jet lag and that was a really good strategy, also allowing for early registration on Sunday. I was not, however, prepared for the jet lag I experienced once I returned home, more on that later.

The keynotes, well, meh. They were entertaining, but lacked content or were just too much of a marketing pitch. The best info was the user survey overview and it was great to see that there is a strong presence for OpenStack in Australia. As usual, the best sessions were the hallway or beer sessions. Monday night was the traditional booth crawl in the Marketplace expo hall, and that was fun. The food and drink options were numerous and plentiful, and attendance was moderate. It was clear to see that this was a much smaller summit than in the past. I don’t have an idea of what the overall attendance number was, but it felt about like San Diego Summit in 2012.

I attended several of the onboarding and update sessions for a few projects and was pleasantly surprised at the progress being made. The Kolla onboarding session was done by Jeffrey Zhang and offered a good overview of the project with plenty of technical content. It was nice to get a different perspective and I learned much more about the configuration of kolla-ansible deployment process. It was lightly attended, but several interested folks had good questions and all seemed engaged.

 

Red Hat’s Steve Hardy did a useful session on an example architecture for using TripleO, Ansible and containers for large deployments of OpenStack. Containers are quickly becoming the new standard for packaging OpenStack services with all their necessary configuration and dependencies and Ansible is also leading the pack in configuration management. TripleO is a somewhat purist view, using OpenStack to manage deployments. It is also the preferred method for getting Red Hat OSP installed in large customer environments. Also noteworthy, the TripleO Project Update, the Kolla Ops Feedback, and Baremetal Server Management with Redfish.

I also attended a couple of sessions on community development. There is some really good information and experience being gathered from the boom and now settling of the community. The work seems to be centered around how do we keep and encourage deep development and core reviewers, while also not discouraging part-time or even one-time contributions. There were discussions on mentoring, legal simplification, and other topics to make sure the community continues adding healthy new members.

Between the sessions, I spent a fair amount of time in and around the IBM booth in the Marketplace expo. One of the fun events planned in the Marketplace was the Melbourne Cup horse race celebration. It was an all day event for some, dressing in full formal attire, but it was very successful in pulling most all attending into the Marketplace to watch the event. I have in the past had a picture of a shiny Power system displayed proudly in the IBM booth, but to everyone involved in the booth organization’s frustration, it did not make it in time. Darn.

I am still not a fan of the split summit/PTG format, and with the lowest attendance in years, I think the community is speaking but the TC and Foundation are just not listening. It is time to focus on the future of the OpenStack project and pull the summit and PTG together again. The community has spoken, few companies can afford to continue to send their developers to 4 conferences or design summits per year.

There is a lot of focus on increasing contributions, the feel is like everyone is trying to restore OpenStack to its once former glory, but the days of rapid growth and rabid over-the-top marketing are over. I feel like the project is finally becoming right-sized after being grotesquely over-invested. It is time to embrace the new reality of the size of the project. Pull in the core projects and developers, get rid of the silly big-tent, and focus on making OpenStack easier to install and use.

Ugh, the jet lag coming home was the worst I have ever experienced. I have heard to plan a day per hour of time zone difference. That might be a bit extreme, but after this trip, I’d have to say it was pretty close. I had trouble restoring my normal rhythm for several days after returning. Going westward to Sydney didn’t give me nearly as much trouble. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my returning flight left at ~11:30 am and arrived home at ~2:15 the same day after almost a day of travel. Ouch.

Sydney is a beautiful city and I hope to be able to return some day. I’m looking forward to seeing OpenStack continue as the framework for open cloud resource management. See you in Dublin for the next PTG!

Boston OpenStack Summit and Forum

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Boston Summit and Forum May 8-11

OpenStack Boston KeynoteI can’t believe yet another summit has come and gone. This was the first summit after the split of Design Summit and PTG and I have to admit overall I felt like it was a success, with some caveats.

The event started off Monday morning with Keynotes – some were really good, some well, not so much. There were a lot of stats presented from the user survey about how OpenStack has grown 44%, where 2/3 of the deployments were in production. That’s great news, especially with the right-sizing that has been happening in the cloud ecosystem.

Even though I feel like OpenStack is the right horse to ride, I fear that there is still some needed correction in the number of projects and active contributors to get it back to a manageable size and focus.

OpenStack Boston IBM BoothAfter several keynote sessions that tested the effectiveness of my morning coffee, I headed off to the booth to see if any help was needed getting up and going before the opening of the Marketplace.

I was determined to increase the Server Group presence in the IBM booth and I am proud of my extended team coming together and making it happen for Boston. I had several team representatives step up and be Subject Matter Experts for Ask-me-about sessions or to give demos in the booth.

It was a smaller booth, but the layout was good and it was always packed with IBMers and interested Stackers. We had a nice new IBM POWER system on display, a new OpenPower system code named “Minsky”. This is a 2 POWER CPU system with 4 NVIDIA GPUs and up to 1TB of memory – all in a 2U rack. There were always folks around drooling over it’s serious computational horsepower.

I volunteered to help work in the booth and to also be a SME for OpenStack support on OpenPower systems. We also had other teams represented from the IBM Open Systems Development/Linux Technology Center there to answer questions about Neutron (networking), Ironic (bare metal provisioning) and Trove (database as a service). I was able to watch several of the demos and the team did a great job.

Monday concluded with the traditional “Booth Crawl” where vendors sponsor hor d’oeuvres and drinks. Since the team was all there working the booth, we didn’t get to wander around and partake, so afterwards we went across the street and had a team dinner at “Whiskey”, a fun, noisy college pub with great food.

I did get a chance to go to a few sessions Monday afternoon, but they were somewhat hit-or-miss. The Ironic Dev-Ops feedback session was good, but there were few sessions overall for Ironic, one of the projects I have been involved recently. I went to one of the Ubuntu sponsored sessions that was supposed to be on GPUs and it wound up just being a LXD sales pitch. I’m an Ubuntu fan and user, but that was a bummer.

Tuesday also started with keynote sessions, but I had a harder time seeing the importance for an OpenStack developer, with the exception of the Interop Challange and their attachment to Cockroach database. I then attended a session from AT&T on their container strategy and how OpenStack is used. They had an interesting 3 pronged approach, with valid cases for each environment, interesting real-world use of OpenStack and containers.

OpenStack Fenway partyThe afternoon was spent chasing down Ironic sessions that ended quickly and working at the booth. That evening was the one public event at the nearby Fenway park. They obviously spent a lot on this event, but honestly it would have been nice to have had a social gathering at the summit hotel, in a ballroom for instance and save the money. Don’t get me wrong, Fenway was amazing, but it was outside, raining, cold and on top of that, there was no provided transportation from the convention. It was only a few blocks, but in the cold and rain. It was a great experience to see the park and have some park grub, but other than buy beers, there wasn’t much to do. I decided that since I could by myself a beer in the dry warmth of the hotel lobby, I decided to call it an early night.

OpenStack ForumWednesday was much more useful for me as the summit transitioned into being more Forum focused. I attended the Kolla project onboarding session. It was the highlight of the show for me since it took the basic understanding that I had of the various parts of Kolla and stitched them all together. It started high-level with an overview of the components and what they did, a review of the project goals, and then deep-dived into the details of building and deployment. My only wish was that the session was recorded for future reference and sharing.

The Forum sessions Wednesday and Thursday were useful, getting closer to what I was hoping for – something like a all-in-one midcycle. But some of the sessions could have been more useful if there was less of the “experts” pontificating the latest buzz-words and more getting down to the business at hand. My favorite buzz word from the Forum: “echo-chambering”. One session that was particularly interesting was one on comparing Kubernetes and OpenStack resource management. It was a useful comparison with clear slides and excellent description. The session slides are available and recommended. I especially enjoyed the glossary comparison of terms and parameters from each environment.

Overall, like I said, it was a good summit. I learned a lot and made new friends. But, I feel like it needs to have more direction in the selection of sessions. For one, pick a much more diverse set of session topics. Every other session was on Kubernetes. I know there were more diverse sessions proposed. Another, feel free to call it an all-in-one mid cycle instead of the Forum. That, with the Ops, Onboarding and Marketplace would make for a great event, and retain the usefulness for a quiet design meeting with just the developers. Next stop: Denver PTG!

OpenStack Pike PTG Atlanta

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Atlanta OpenStack PTG

The very first OpenStack PTG (Project Teams Gathering) in Atlanta has now come and gone. I have to admit, I was somewhat skeptical about whether splitting the design summit and the main marketing/user summit was a good idea. I have seen these kinds of splits happen in other open source communities with disastrous results. However, at least from the perspective of pure design effectiveness I have to concede that Atlanta PTG was an enormous success. We will have to see what kind of impact this split has on the Boston Summit “Forum” in May, whether we will have enough critical mass to have a meaningful marketing and end user convention.

From a experienced developer’s perspective, the Atlanta PTG was a success. The location was somewhat difficult, not because it wasn’t a nice hotel, but because there was not any grocery, shopping or restaurants close. Because of that, I’m not sure they achieved the goal of holding the event at a lower cost to the developer. I can imagine that someone attending might feel lost if they are just getting started and looking for some context or are not yet technical or wanting to contribute. There were no keynotes or getting started sessions. The assumption was that everyone there was ready to spend the week working on defining exactly what would be delivered in the Pike release of OpenStack. It actually reminded me of the earlier summits or of UDS/Linaro connect sprints where the marketing hype was very limited and the focus was on teams working together. All in all, I’d say it was a very good first effort.

OpenStack PTG The PTG was also scheduled well, at least for me. I was able to divide the week up into the two projects that I will be spending the most time in for the Pike release cycle. I spent the first two days of the PTG in Kolla. I spent the rest of the PTG with the Ironic team. The cross project meetings the first part of the week at PTG were also very productive. It was great to be able to go across the hall to another ballroom to grab someone out of the Neutron or Nova teams to ask them a question.

I was trying to save money and flew in very early Monday morning. In retrospect, that was not a wise move. I affirmed that I really do not enjoy driving to the airport at 3:00am, and it made the day very long. I would have been much better equipped to have meaningful discussions if I had made the trip a day or more in advance. It also put me in a sleep-time deficit for the week that was difficult to make up. Lesson learned.

Kolla Team

The Kolla team started off the first of two days discussing repositories, which I missed due to traveling that morning. I arrived in the second half of the documentation planning. I found this session to be a good gentle warm-up to the deeper topics the rest of the day, especially for someone that had been up since 2:45am and just got off a train from the airport, luggage in tow. The Kolla team was well organized heading into the PTG, with good description and back-story for the session topics. For me the best design sessions always seem to happen in the halls between sessions, at lunch, or at impromptu break-out sessions with a few developers. This was the case for working out the details for supporting non-x86 hardware architecture for Kolla. The Linaro team has been actively helping OpenStack stay architecture platform independent. The first day of Kolla discussions concluded with a team dinner at the Atlanta Hard Rock Cafe. I really wanted to go, but I was so tired that I knew it would be better for me to just go back to the hotel and call it a day.

Tuesday’s Kolla sessions started off with discussions on container distros and image refactoring, topics that I found especially useful and hopefully made meaningful contributions to. There was a brief discussion about the multi-arch support, but it was basically an acknowledgement that, ok-you-all-have-that-covered, let-us-know-how-to-help kind of thing. There were really good brainstorming and framing discussions on brownfield migration and how to test that with multi-node gate testing.

I was able to introduce myself to most all of the cores and the PTL over the course of the day. That is one of the great things about these meetups, is to be able to meet and know that person that you interact with in IRC. The other great thing that happens is that I get to meet IBMers that I have worked with for years and never met in person. Tuesday, I met and had lunch with the PowerVC team and others from IBM.

Ironic Team

Wednesday started the Ironic team discussions and after introductions we dove right into a Pike priorities overview. Driver composition came up and the need to maybe auto generate a capabilities table in the driver documentation. The discussion moved fast Wednesday and covered a lot of ground. Python 3 compatibility is a common theme and was discussed, as well as a session on CI testing. I was attending this with Mike Turek, also on my team in the IBM Linux Technology Center. It was his first OpenStack event, but you wouldn’t have known. He jumped right in and volunteered to be the scribe for all the etherpad discussions and did a great job.

A large part of Thursday discussions centered on future work for Pike and much deeper design discussions. As usual for multi-day design summits, my attention span and processing ability were diminishing. The day concluded with the team dinner, which unfortunately, Mike and I decided to not attend. It was far away from the downtown area and not easily accessible from public transportation. Since I was on a very limited budget for this trip, I decided not to get a cab or worse, rent a car. I didn’t find out until too late or I would have arranged to get a ride with someone else. But, on the upside, I was invited by Miguel Lavalle to crash the Neutron team dinner, so Mike and I went and had a great time and good food.

Friday was a short day for me as I was leaving early to catch a flight back home. It was an Ironic working session that started with a reflection discussion. It was a usual what worked, what didn’t session, and the usual topics came up, how to onboard more developers and encourage core mentoring. It was brought up the OpenStack is going through a re-adjustment period, I like to think of it as a right-sizing from the massive over-hyped beginnings of the project. Core reviewer mentoring is going to be a big concern for several projects where they are down to just a few from debs being moved off to other projects. About that time, I gave in to the growing brain mush from the design week and headed to the airport.

All in all, I think it was a success. I look forward to Boston and seeing what will need to be adjusted there to continue forward with the split summits. Stay tuned.

Austin Summit Ironic Social

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Since I was local, I decided to host an Ironic Social so everyone had a chance to get to know each other better outside of “work”. It proved to be harder than I thought to find a place close to the convention center with a wide selection of beers, wine, and mixed drinks, and a varied-enough menu to satisfy those with dietary restrictions, and large enough to handle 30-40 people at once. I talked to several places and decided on the Waller Creek Pub House. It was bar-service only which seemed to be alright, despite some lines at first when 30 people showed up and wanted to order a drink or some dinner. The staff did their best to accommodate us along with their normal Thursday night crowd. It was well attended with at least 30 showing up. I hope everyone had a good time, I certainly did.

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