Last week I was fortunate enough to participate in the OpenStack Summit, which was held in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. This is the second summit held in Vancouver, and for good reason: the facilities are first-class, and the location is one of the most beautiful you will find.
From the signage around the Convention Centre and the Keynote, the theme of the summit was clear: Open Infrastructure. The OpenStack Foundation is broadening its focus to not only include the OpenStack code itself, but also a range of technologies to deploy, run, and support modern data centers.
The highlight (or maybe lowlight?) was the sponsored keynote by Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical. Generally speaking, companies which may be competitors in the marketplace but which work together to create OpenStack, put aside their differences and focus on their shared interests. Not Shuttleworth – he used the freedom that paying for that slot offered to badmouth both Red Hat and VMWare, claiming that Canonical can deliver OpenStack for a fraction of the cost of those two companies. While it’s likely true that OpenStack on Ubuntu would be less expensive than when running on a commercial distribution, the whole thing left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. I know that this is typical Shuttleworth, but still… the spirit of coming together to collaborate took a big hit.
One thing I noticed was this slide that was presented showing how OpenStack supports “diverse architectures”.
Up until this summit, IBM had been a Platinum Member of the OpenStack Foundation, but greatly reduced its level of financial support recently. So it was a little curious that IBM’s architecture, POWER, was missing from this slide. Probably just an oversight, right?
After the keynotes, I went to the session by Belmiro Moreira of CERN, who spoke about CERN’s experience moving their large OpenStack deployment from Cells v1, to Cells v2 running in Pike. If you don’t know CERN, they run tens of thousands of servers in two data centers in order to support the research computations needed for the Large Hadron Collider. There is an inside joke among OpenStack developers when considering a change is whether it will help CERN or not – it’s sort of our performance test bed. Belmiro’s talk was very enlightening about just how these changes affected their performance. At first they had horrible results, but they were able to remedy them with config option changes as well as some horizontal scaling. In other words, it worked the way we had hoped it would: adjusting things that were designed to be adjusted, instead of having to hack around the code.
Another interesting session was the one discussing what would be needed to extract the Placement service from Nova into an independent project. The session was led by Chris Dent, who has done a lot of the prep work for the extraction. Nothing unexpected came from the session, which is a good thing; it showed that everyone on the Nova and Placement teams are in agreement on the path forward.
There was a session on Tuesday morning entitled “Revisiting Scalability and Applicability of OpenStack Placement“, by Yaniv Saar. There was some confusion on the subject, as the presenter used non-standard terminology, which was unfortunate; he used ‘placement’ to refer to the output of the Nova scheduler, not the Placement service itself. He had done extensive testing and statistical analysis to support his concept of a variation of the caching scheduler that only refreshed its cache after a given number of failures. The problem with this session was that all the work was done on the Mitaka code base, which pre-dates the creation of the Placement service. Most of the issues he “solved” have already been addressed by the Placement service, so his conclusions, while thoroughly backed up with numbers, dealt with a 3-year-old code base, and was irrelevant to the state of scheduling in Nova today.
After that was the API-SIG session (etherpad), where Gilles Dubreuil of Red Hat led the discussion about running a proof-of-concept for GraphQL. We discussed the various options for the best way to move forward with the PoC, with the principle that at the end (assuming success), we wanted a result that would be the most impressive to the OpenStack community, and possible persuade teams to adopt GraphQL. Gilles volunteered to lead this effort, and all of us in the API-SIG will be following closely to gauge the progress.
In the afternoon I went to the session on StarlingX, a new project from Wind River and Intel. I’m not up on all the history of this project, but it sure raised a lot of strong reactions among some long-time OpenStack people. As a result, I really don’t get the downside here; if you don’t want to support this code, well, just don’t support it. If there aren’t enough people who are interested, it will die a deserving death. If people do find some value there, then have at it.
Later in the afternoon I gave a talk along with Eric Fried on the state of the Placement service. Eric started by demonstrating that Placement isn’t just for Nova; it could be used to manage the groceries in your refrigerator! The examples were humorous, but did serve to show that the Placement service is agnostic about what sorts of resources you want to manage with it. I followed that with a recap of all the changes we had done in Queens and Rocky (so far), and what we are and will be working on in the future. I’ve gotten some positive feedback from people who attended the talk, so that makes me happy.
Wednesday was light on sessions for me, because I had to take advantage of being in the same time zone as Tony Breeds of Red Hat, with whom I’m collaborating on some internal IBM-Red Hat stuff. We had been having some issues, and the half-day time difference made it hard to get any momentum. So I spent a good deal of the day working on the internal project with Tony.
One session that was interesting was on API Debt Cleanup, which arose from an extended discussion on the openstack-dev mailing list. The advent of microversions has made adding to or changing an API smoother, but removing things that we no longer want to support is any easier. The consensus was that raising the minimum microversion that is supported should be signaled by a new major version. Some people on the dev side weren’t clear why they should keep supporting ancient, rusty parts of the code, but since there are SDKs that have been released that may use that code, we can’t ever assume that “no one uses this anymore”. Another part of the discussion was about making error codes/messages more consistent across projects. There were some proposed formats, but none that I feel provided any advantage over the existing API-SIG guideline on Error formats.
Thursday was the final day of the summit. I spent a lot of it working on the internal IBM-Red Hat project with Tony, with the rest of it focused on the Technical Committee sessions. I haven’t been as active in TC matters since they switched from a regular weekly meeting to the Office Hours format, but I do try to keep up with things via the mailing list. I don’t have any particular insights to share with you here, but it was good to see that the TC is getting better at communicating what’s going on the to public, and that they are reacting to criticisms, real or perceived, of how and what they do. I was also encouraged by their acknowledgement of the lack of geographic diversity in their membership, and their desire to address that.
Of course, it’s not possible to travel to Vancouver, go to a conference, and just leave. So on Thursday evening I was joined by my wife, and thanks to the long holiday weekend (at least in the US), we got to enjoy both the city of Vancouver, as well as the natural beauty of the surrounding area. Let me close with a few photos from the beautiful Vancouver area. If the OpenStack Foundation announced another summit there, I will be the first to sign up!
