openstack team mailing list archive

[Matt Joyce <matt.joyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is going to come off as a bit of a rant.  Pardon me.  I feel it needs
saying.

There's a few ways to look at what OpenStack is.  It's an IaaS solution.
It's a cloud solution.  But at it's heart, core to the design principles of
OpenStack development ideology it is a collection of tools designed
specifically to support elastic design patterns.

The reason I bring this up is because of some thinking I've been doing
about the future of OpenStack.  Where it's place  is in the world.  Where
it's place will be in the world.  I've found that despite the crass nature
of the puppies vs cattle explanation of elastic design, it really does get
the most important selling point home to potential customers, and engineers
who don't do ec2 already.  And that point is that OpenStack exists to
further a design pattern.  It's not about clouds, or IaaS.  It's about a
design pattern.  The pattern of horizontal scalability.  The pattern of
ephemeral resources.  The pattern of share nothing.  These core design
ethics allow us to build software in a fashion that makes it consumable,
scalable, and fault tolerant beyond any existing pattern by far.  It makes
development efforts become commodities that can be openly traded on a
market free or otherwise.

We need to stop thinking of OpenStack as just an IaaS solution.  Or just a
cloud.  It's a development platform.  It's a way of building software
well.  Once we do that, we can look to the past and see where we need to
go.  We want OpenStack to enjoy the some level of success as Java, or
python as a collaborative development environment.  We want kids in
colleges to be training to write the next 50 years of applications in our
environment, following our design patterns.  But to do that, and to do it
well, we'll need to solve a few things.

This thread points to a growing problem in our community.  One that was a
primary focus of discussion in the last summit.  OpenStack deployments are
growing up and they are growing apart.  We're building things too
differently.  The reason we employed PEP-8 gate tests, and the reason
python works as a language in general is in part because when you give
developers too many options, you end up losing a common language, or
methodology that allows us to easily come up to speed on each others work.
It makes collaboration hard.  Now, not to start a language war, but I love
perl.  Nothing rips apart text like perl.  Nothing.  But, at the same time,
I know that if I write perl code, it's going to be a pain in the ass for
someone to come back to that code later and maintain it.  Python on the
other hand, especially with PEP-8, restricts a developers aesthetic
options.  It forces us to follow a common grammar.

My point here, is that when you ask people what languages work with a 100+
active developers working on the same project, you get responses like Java,
C#, maybe python.  And you say, well why?  And one of the responses is that
Java and C# have an extensive common library.  It allows developers to
share a common method set.  We've already begun the task of creating oslo
to solve part of that problem for us in development.  But in deployment,
we're woefully behind the curve.  We want to support diversity in the
market eco system, but we also want to ensure that an OpenStack environment
is adherent to some sort of baseline or flavor set.  That is why folks have
begun pushing things like refstack.

I look at this thread, and what I see is a further need to unify solutions
into a community supported method set that trumps outliers and one offs.  A
common set of tools.  A common library of solutions.  If OpenStack is to be
the development environment of the next 75 years or more, we need to build
this.  It's one part of the many things we need to and are doing.  But it's
an important part.  I think we can't just say, this isn't part of
openstack, or this is outside of scope.  It's part of the development
environment that OpenStack is the runtime environment for ( forgive the
analogy ).

Anyways,

    That's my rant.

-Matt


On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Marton Kiss <marton.kiss@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Michael, thanks for the feedback, I record it as a feature request as a
> different view of projects.
>
> M.
>
>
> 2013/5/3 Michael Bright <mjbrightfr@xxxxxxxxx>
>
>>
>> I just discovered these different sites thanks to this mail thread.
>>
>> I guess different people are looking for different types of info, judging
>> by these exchanges.
>>
>> Whatever you decide as to where the list is hosted, I just wanted to say
>> that I appreciated the simple *but* informative format
>> of the related projects page
>> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/RelatedProjects rather than the more
>> dashboard like interfaces.
>>
>> My 2 cts,
>> Mike.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3 May 2013 22:07, Marton Kiss <marton.kiss@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> It is a good idea, it was the original plan with this project. If
>>> Harvard also like to use it we can refactor the current stackmeat distro
>>> into a common project distribution (like openatrium or openpublish) and
>>> OpenStack and Harvard distribution can inherit the commonly maintained
>>> codebase.
>>>
>>> M.
>>>
>>>
>>> 2013/5/3 Stefano Maffulli <stefano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>
>>>> On Fri 03 May 2013 12:15:26 PM PDT, Marton Kiss wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm taking care of stackmeat, and some feature upgrade is in the
>>>>> queue. If somebody like to join and help in content management, any
>>>>> help is welcome from my part.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I would vote to include stackmeat inside the OpenStack infrastructure
>>>> so that others can contribute to it and the site can go on.
>>>>
>>>> What do you guys think?
>>>>
>>>> /stef
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>
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