openstack team mailing list archive

[Nathanael Burton <nathanael.i.burton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ah, I meant foundation (lowercase f) as in the basis on which an IaaS
system is built not a management/governance system ala the Apache
Foundation or OpenStack Foundation. However I agree that the comparison and
points are apropos.

Nate
On Aug 10, 2012 9:40 PM, "Eric Windisch" <eric@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
>
> On Aug 10, 2012, at 20:49, Nathanael Burton <nathanael.i.burton@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> I personally equate OpenStack to the Linux Kernel. It's the foundation and
> core components that, in OpenStack's case, make up an Infrastructure as as
> Service (IaaS) system, a "cloud" kernel.  We should expect the core
> components and APIs to be stable with sane deprecation policies, but
> OpenStack shouldn't do everything for everyone. It should facilitate and
> provide the stable framework or foundation in which to build production
> quality, large scale (and small) public and private IaaS systems. In and of
> itself I believe OpenStack is not an IaaS distribution, ala Linux
> distributions (Debian, Fedora, RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu) which take the Linux
> kernel and build all the user-space and complementary services that make up
> a manageable, secure, monitored system.
>
>
> An even better example might be Apache. They have their own foundation and
> have a number of services that get installed to machines, but they don't
> have a distribution or any clear deployment solutions.  Some of their
> applications such as the httpd are just core pieces that get installed to a
> single system and multiple services on multiple machines don't communicate,
> but others are horizontally scaling solutions with inter-process
> communication, such as Hadoop.  Whatever the case, they're still not
> building a distribution.
>
> OpenStack in some ways appears to be the kernel on which applications run,
> but its applications are just applications. If the question is where the
> foundation draws the line at acceptance of projects, it is an interesting
> one... as long as there is a foundation, you can't really use Linux as any
> sort of example.  Instead, if you want to draw parallels to operating
> systems, you'll have to look more closely to the BSD systems.
>
> With BSD, they've coupled the kernels and the distributions. I do not
> think this is a model that OpenStack should follow, but I do see a tendency
> of some toward this. Instead, I believe the community and the foundation
> should move into the direction of Apache.
>
> If someone wants to create their own independent distribution, they
> should, but it shouldn't be part of the project or blessed by the
> foundation. Instead, they would follow the steps of Slackware, Debian, and
> Gentoo; not the steps taken by FreeBSD. The community already has a number
> of emerging proprietary and/or corporate-sponsored distributions, it would
> not do the community a favor for the foundation to create its own.
>
> Regards,
> Eric Windisch
> (sent from my iPad)
>