Tag Archives: TripleO

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!

OpenStack Queens PTG Denver

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The OpenStack Denver Project Teams Gathering (PTG) was a very busy, but productive week. There were some shining moments and some things that didn’t work very well. Since I only have Atlanta PTG to compare it to, there were things this time that I would like to see done differently. In Atlanta, there were team sessions scheduled all week, with a loose cross-project focus the first two days. In Denver, this was made more formal, where the first two days were only cross-project sessions. The reason this worked in Altanta was because if you were interested in more than one project, you could pick and choose sessions spread out over the whole week that you needed to be in. Since the project-specific sessions were only the last three days in Denver, this compressed schedule made it much harder to cover everything. What happen as a result was the first two days were sparsely attended discussions, some went well and others not at all. Some developers didn’t even show up for the first two days making true cross-project discussions even harder.

Traveling to Denver was uneventful, although I still don’t much care for flying Southwest. The concept of having to fight for a seat brings back memories of general admission concerts as a teenager and being crammed against a stage. Seating becomes a competition of quickest online check-in that opens 24 hrs before flight time or upgraded “early-bird” priority for an additional cost. Not a good model, and one more thing to have to worry about when traveling.

OpenStack Documentation team hard at work

Monday started off with breakfast with fellow IBMers. I then started off with the Documentation cross-project session. There were some good discussions on future plans and lesson learned from the previous cycle. I had lunch with another IBMer and them went to the skip-level upgrades breakout being driven by TripleO. TripleO will be shifting to using container-based services in the Queens development cycle, but the discussion basically centered around Ubuntu and how they handled migrations and upgrades. The highlight of the day was the final breakout session with representatives from the Kolla, Cinder, and Ironic teams where we discussed the alternative Kolla dev environment instead of using Devstack. There were concerns about the available functionality, but the environment is basically there and ready for developers to start using it. The more use it gets, the better it will become. We all agreed that it was too early to start planning for Devstack replacement for upstream CI testing, for projects that would be interested. Right now, the idea is to just get developers to start using the environment to work out any changes that need to be made to make it more robust. That night, the Ironic team had their team dinner, and even though I have not been as active there this last release, they were all gracious enough to let me tag along.Ironic team dinner

Tuesday morning started with team pictures, some of which turned out pretty good, but I still haven’t found the repository for all of them. A few were posted here and there, but never all of them, not sure why. Here is the pic for the Kolla team, it turned out pretty good. There were silly versions also, but, meh. Kolla team picNext, it was time to find a session that is interesting and hopefully useful. Success. Back to the Documentation team room where progress was made on the remaining focus items for this cycle. Doug Hellman then did a great tutorial session on the new documentation system. He did a great job laying out how it is all organized and how to use and modify the templates. Very useful for the upcoming Kolla work this release. Tuesday lunch and afternoon were a series of very useful non-PTG scheduled impromptu discussions with partners and collaborators.

IBM happy hour sponsorshipThat evening, IBM did a great job sponsoring the PTG Happy Hour Reception social. There was a really nice introduction made by Sean Dague, which reminded me that we’ve been at this for more than 5 years. It is amazing what has been accomplished in that time, but more importantly, the good friends I’ve made along the way. This social was a really good way to chat with all those friends and enjoy a glass of wine and some tasty food. Thanks IBM.

Wednesday started the much anticipated team specific part of PTG Denver. More devs arrived ready to dive into their team’s plans. Since Ironic, TripleO and Kolla were happening at the same time, it was hard to balance the presence at these discussions. Luckily we were able to have Mike Turek representing our team at the Ironic sessions, so that made it easier for me to focus on Kolla sessions. The session started with a generous time allotted for Kolla documentation restructuring and enhancement. The documentation team came to the session and were a big help getting us organized for a new new table of contents. There was a cross-project discussion that afternoon on TripleO and Kolla collaboration. They went through the release plans to move to using Kolla containers. This session went over some of the needs for the team to be able to use the same orchestration playbooks. That evening we had the Kolla team dinner at a local BBQ restaurant.

Thursday started with a few meetings for downstream topics back at work. I listened in to the Kolla gate discussion, while I caught up on email and followed up with the todo actions from the morning’s meetings. I went by the Cyborg room in hopes of hearing the state of accelerator resources for OpenStack, but was frustrated when I found out that the session had been rescheduled and I had missed it. I switched to the TripleO room for a good overview of their plans for migrating to containers. The plan is to at least migrate to containers in the overcloud in the Queens release, and possibly for the undercloud as well. That afternoon, Tony Breeds drove a discussion on multi-architecture support in TripleO. It went fairly smoothly, with the initial plan to continue to support x86 architecture for the undercloud, adding support for a non-x86 overcloud in Queens. We have some work to do here to make sure that the container images are available to those needing them. That evening, we had the LTC team dinner after yet another happy hour sponsored by the Foundation. It was great to get to hang out with the team in a non-work setting and the food was fantastic.

Friday was a planned work day for the Kolla team. We split up into different groups and addressed topics ranging from the documentation restructuring to upstream testing and Zuulv3. I didn’t get to spend much time with the team as I was flying home that afternoon, but I was able to get started on the patch for the new documentation restructuring table of contents. I stuffed in a few more conversations, had a quick bite of lunch and headed for the airport.

In summary, I think the Denver PTG was successful. The layout of the sessions was a little awkward, but worked fine. There were complaints about the venue and the train noise, but they never really bothered me. As usual, at any OpenStack event I have been to, the best discussions happened outside of the scheduled topics. The best parts are lunch and dinner with team members and interaction with IBMers that I never get to see face to face except at events like this. Next is Sydney for Summit and then, the just announced location of Dublin for the next PTG. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there.