openstack team mailing list archive

[Scott Moser <smoser@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011, Thierry Carrez wrote:

> Paul Voccio wrote:
> > So the question I want to pose to the community is if they are
> > interested in the code, where should it go and how should we move
> > forward on extending it?
>
> I think it's always interesting to publish the code. I'm not convinced
> of the value of shipping it inside Nova though.
>
I agree with this.  To me, the agent is a completely separate piece of
code from nova.  The agent would be able to interact via some
communication channel with *something*.  That something should not need to
be openstack.

I'm not aware of all that your guest agent does, later in this thread,
configuring networking and setting password was mentioned.  If you ignore
configuring of initial networking, then its really not tied at all to the
hypervisor.  I could communicate with an agent that allows setting of root
password via tcp/ip with that agent running in a guest kvm on my local
machine.

What I'm getting at, is that I think you should position this as a
separate project.   Define that openstack supports communication with a
guest agent via a known protocol that can happen over a list of transports
(xen store, vmware host-guest link...).   Then, multiple guest agents
that speak that protocol can arise.

Overall, I think it both reduces the complexity of openstack and increases
the ability for guest OS innovation by clearly defining that boundary.


> I'm not in the POC so it's not my job to define what should be
> considered "Openstack core" and what should not, but "compatible guest
> agents" IMO typically warrant their own project...