Last week was the OpenStack Summit, which was held in Sydney, NSW, Australia. This was my first summit since the split with the PTG, and it felt very different than previous summits. In the past there was a split between the business community part of the summit and the Design Summit, which was where the dev teams met to plan the work for the upcoming cycle. With the shift to the PTG, there is no move developer-centric work at the summit, so I was free to attend sessions instead of being buried in the Nova room the whole time. That also meant that I was free to explore the hallway track more than in the past, and as a result I had many interesting conversations with fellow OpenStackers.
There was also only one keynote session on Monday morning. I found this a welcome change, because despite getting some really great information, there are the inevitable vendor keynotes that bore you to tears. Some vendors get it right: they showed the cool scientific research that their OpenStack cloud was enabling, and knowing that I’m helping to make that happen is always a positive feeling. But other vendors just drone about things like the number of cores they are running, and the tools that they use to get things running and keep them running. Now don’t get me wrong: that’s very useful information, but it’s not keynote material. I’d rather see it written up on their website as a reference document.
On Monday after the keynote we had a lively session for the API-SIG, with a lot of SDK developers participating. One issue was that of keeping up with API changes and deprecating older API versions. In many cases, though, the reason people use an SDK is to be insulated from that sort of minutiae; they just want it to work. Sometimes that comes at a price of not having access to the latest features offered by the API. This is where the SDK developer has to determine what would work best for their target users.
Another discussion was how to best use microversions within an SDK. The consensus was to pin each request to the particular microversion that provides the desired functionality, rather than make all requests at the same version. There was a suggestion to have aliases for the latest microversion for each release; e.g., “OpenStack-API-Version: compute pike” would return the latest behaviors that were available for the Nova Pike release. This idea was rejected, as it dilutes the meaning and utility of what a microversion is.
On the Tuesday I helped with the Nova onboarding session, along with Dan Smith and Melanie Witt. We covered things like the layout of code in the Nova repository, and also some of the “magic” that handles the RPC communication among services within Nova. While the people attending seemed to be interested in this, it was hard to gauge the effectiveness for them, as we got precious few questions, and those we did get really didn’t have much to do with what we covered.
That evening the folks from Aptira hired a fairly large party boat, and invited several people to attend. I was fortunate enough to be invited along with my wife, and we had a wonderful evening cruising around Sydney Harbour, with some delicious food and drink provided. I also got to meet and converse with several other IBMers.
There were other sessions I attended, but mostly out of curiosity about the subject. The only other session with anything worth reporting was with the Ironic team and their concerns about the change to scheduling by resource classes and traits. There was still a significant lack of understanding about how this will work for many in the room, which I interpret to mean that we who are creating the Placement service are not communicating this well enough. I was glad that I was able to clarify several things for those who had concerns, and I think that everyone had a better understanding of both how things are supposed to work, as well as what will be required to move their deployments forward.
One development I was especially interested in was the announcement of OpenLab, which will be especially useful for testing SDKs across multiple clouds. Many people attending the API-SIG session thought that they would want to take advantage of that for their SDK work.
My overall impression of the new Summit format is that, as a developer, it leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps it was because the PTGs have become the place where all the real development planning happens, and so many of the people who I normally would have a chance to interact with simply didn’t come. The big benefit of in-person conferences is getting to know the new people who have joined the project, and re-establishing ties with those with whom you have worked for a while. If you are an OpenStack developer, the PTGs are essential; the Summits, no so much. It will be interesting to see how this new format evolves in the future.
If you’re interested in more in-depth coverage of what went on at the Summit, be sure to read the summary from Superuser.
The location was far away for me, but Sydney was wonderful! We took a few days afterwards to holiday down in Hobart, Tasmania, which made the long journey that much more worth the effort.
