Month: January 2015

The second day of the mid-cycle meetup was very different than the first (for a summary of that, please see yesterday’s post). While there was a set agenda that the group as a whole went through on Day 1, today was more or less broken out into ad-hoc groups who were working on a particular issue; many of these were groups of 1. So this post will be a lot shorter than yesterday’s, since I don’t know just what went on in each of those groups. Many of the groups were focused on patches that were very close to being ready that a lot of other work was depending on, with the goal of giving them that final push they needed to get them merged. I listened in on many of these discussions, mostly to learn more about that particular part of the codebase, since I didn’t have enough familiarity to help with the coding side of things. I also spent a lot of time reviewing the changes that were being pushed, which is also an excellent way to learn, as you not only can see the code, but you can read the insights of the other reviewers about the changes.

In the afternoon we had several of the nova-spec cores review my spec on changing how the scheduler gets instance information. I know that some people dread having their work examined and criticized, but I happen to love it. The discussions uncovered several things that needed to be accounted for that had never come up in all the prior back-and-forth on the spec, so I spent a lot of the rest of the afternoon incorporating their suggestions into a revised version, and pushed that up before the day was done. It also shows how these in-person meetings can get so much more accomplished than our typical remote tools such as email and IRC, and why the summits and mid-cycles are critical to attend.

I’m here in Palo Alto, California, for the mid-cycle meetup of the OpenStack Nova team. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the OpenStack community worldwide gets together every 6 months at a Summit to collectively celebrate what we’ve accomplished, and to plan what we’ll be working on for the next 6 months. During the months that follow, though, it’s easy for things to slide off to the side, or for other things to creep up and get in the way of continued progress. So many of the programs that make up OpenStack plan on getting together about halfway through the process so that we all get an idea of the progress we’ve made, and can discuss and potentially solve any of the issues that would prevent us from completing the work we set out to do for this cycle.

For the Nova team, we set out several things as the priorities that we would be focusing on: the next generation of the Cells design (cells v2); the continued development of Nova Objects; cleaning up the interface between the Scheduler and Nova so that scheduler may eventually be split out; the v2.1 API (microversions); functional testing; nova-network migration; no downtime upgrades; as well as working on the number of bugs we have, and improving our testing infrastructure. The meeting today started with the people heading up each of those tasks giving an update on their progress.

First up was Cells v2. It’s moving along well, but not as fast as they would like. One of the big things was getting the CI testing working with cells, which currently cause most tests to fail. Progress has been made on disabling these tests for now, with the goal of fixing them so that our CI tests with cells on, which will be the standard once this work is complete. Cells are now a configurable option, and the tests now run with it off. By turning this back on, and adding the fixed tests in, we can eventually be confident that any new feature in Nova will work right away in a deployment using cells.

There has been good progress with the Objects work, but the biggest problem is that the first item to be objectified, Flavors, is a hairy mess, and required a bunch of changes to undo all the hacks that made flavors work in the past. Once completed it will bring a lot more sanity to flavors (which is a concept I believe should die in a fire, but I fought it years ago and lost, so we’re stuck with it now).

On the Scheduler front, we only had one outstanding spec (mine, of course!), and lots of code up for review. The series of patches to detach Service from Compute Node is the top priority, as so much of the later patches depend on these changes.

None of the principal movers on the v2.1 API was able to make the mid-cycle, but they did fill in some of their progress information on our shared etherpad. The testing integration is nearly done, but one possible problem is support for v2.1 in novaclient.

Functional testing is aiming to get a dozen or so test patterns defined that others can use as the basis for writing future functional tests. There probably won’t be much more than that in the Kilo timeframe, but the hope is that going forward these can help make funcitonal testing more pervasive.

There is a bunch of work being done for the nova-network to neutron migration, but one thing that everyone working on this wanted to make clear is that while they will be creating some tools to help deployers who want to make the switch, there will not be a single “click it and forget it” single-button migration in the near future. One other issue brought up is that while we are telling everyone who is deploying OpenStack to use Neutron and not nova-network, devstack still uses nova-network. This is poor dogfooding, so it was agreed that we will start to move devstack to use Neutron.

The zero-downtime migrations was interesting: the idea is that instead of running the current SQLAlchemy migrations which require taking the database offline, The new expand/contract approach will compare the defined structures in code with the current database, and if there is a discrepency, create the new structures (expand), migrate the data over, and then later remove the old, unneeded structures (contract). The first code patches to accomplish this have been working, although a lot of work remains to update the tests accordingly.

That was just the morning! The afternoon started with a whiteboard discussion I had asked for where we could identify just what we expect the interface between Nova and the (separated) Scheduler to look like. We did get into a little bit of implementation details at times, but overall we clarified the flow of messages between the two, and defined where the responsibility for ensuring that each build request succeeds should go. A lot of the discussion focused on how we can make the overall process bulletproof, which some saw as a tangent, but I think that this is what is needed: figure out what a solid, robust scheduling solution should look like, and though we aren’t going to get there in this cycle, or even the next, we can make sure that we’re moving towards that design.

The remainder of the day was largely focused on discussing process: how the Nova project is run. Was enough information communicated about what the priorities were? Were the various channels of communication being used well? How can we help the few Nova core reviewers handle the huge number of reviews more effectively? Everyone seemed to have their own preference (e.g., email vs. IRC), but no one had any concrete suggestions about what needs to change. It was pointed out that while the loads are high, they haven’t been getting worse, so there is some measure of stability.

I’m looking forward to Day 2, where we plan on breaking into smaller groups to focus on pushing through as many of the critical patches we can while we’re all in the same room. We’ll see how that goes!