OpenStack

What’s missing from the ONAP community — an open design process

I've been thinking a fair bit about ONAP and its future releases recently. This is in the context of trying to implement a system for a client which is based on ONAP. Its really hard though, because its hard to determine how various components of ONAP are intended to work, or interoperate. It took me a while, but I've realised what's missing here... OpenStack has an open design process. If you want to add a new feature to Nova for example, the first step is you need to write down what the feature is intended to do, how it integrates with the rest of Nova, and how people might use it. The target audience for that document is both the Nova development team, but also people who operate OpenStack deployments. ONAP has no equivalent that I can find. So for example, they say that in Casablanca they are going to implement a "AAI Enricher" to ease lookup of data from external systems in their inventory database, but I can't find anywhere where they explain how the integration between arbitrary external systems and ONAP AAI will work. I think ONAP would really benefit from a good hard look at their design processes…

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Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make

The following is a blog post version of a talk presented at pyconau 2018. Slides for the presentation can be found here (as Microsoft powerpoint, or as PDF), and a video of the talk (thanks NextDayVideo!) is below:

 

OpenStack is an orchestration system for setting up virtual machines and associated other virtual resources such as networks and storage on clusters of computers. At a high level, OpenStack is just configuring existing facilities of the host operating system — there isn’t really a lot of difference between OpenStack and a room full of system admins frantically resolving tickets requesting virtual machines be setup. The only real difference is scale and predictability.

To do its job, OpenStack needs to be able to manipulate parts of the operating system which are normally reserved for administrative users. This talk is the story of how OpenStack has done that thing over time, what we learnt along the way, and what I’d do differently if I had my time again. Lots of systems need to do these things, so even if you never use OpenStack hopefully there are things to be learnt here.

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The last week for linux.conf.au 2019 proposals!

Dear humans of the Internet -- there is ONE WEEK LEFT to propose talks for linux.conf.au 2019. LCA is one of the world's best open source conferences, and we'd love to hear you speak!   Unsure what to propose? Not sure if your talk is what the conference would normally take? Just want a chat? You're welcome to reach out to papers-chair@linux.org.au to talk things through.   https://linux.conf.au/call-for-papers/

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Rejected talk proposal: Design at scale: OpenStack versus Kubernetes

This proposal was submitted for pyconau 2018. It wasn’t accepted, but given I’d put the effort into writing up the proposal I’ll post it here in case its useful some other time. The oblique references to OpensStack are because pycon had an “anonymous” review system in 2018, and I was avoiding saying things which directly identified me as the author.

OpenStack and Kubernetes solve very similar problems. Yet they approach those problems in very different ways. What can we learn from the different approaches taken? The differences aren’t just technical though, there are some interesting social differences too. (more…)

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Accepted talk proposal: Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make

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This proposal was submitted for pyconau 2018. It was accepted, but hasn’t been presented yet. The oblique references to OpensStack are because pycon had an “anonymous” review system in 2018, and I was avoiding saying things which directly identified me as the author.

Since 2011, I’ve worked on a large Open Source project in python. It kind of got out of hand – 1000s of developers and millions of lines of code. Yet despite being well resourced, we made the same mistakes that those tiny scripts you whip up to solve a small problem make. Come learn from our fail.

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On Selecting a Well Engaged Open Source Vendor

Aptira is in an interesting position in the Open Source market, because we don’t usually sell software. Instead, our customers come to us seeking assistance with deciding which OpenStack to use, or how to embed ONAP into their nationwide networks, or how to move their legacy networks to the software defined future. Therefore, our most common role is as a trusted advisor to help our customers decide which Open Source products to buy. (My boss would insist that I point out here that we do customisation of Open Source for our customers, and have assisted many in the past with deploying pure upstream solutions. Basically, we do what is the right fit for the customer, and aren’t obsessed with fitting customers into pre-defined moulds that suit our partners.) That makes it important that we recommend products from companies that are well engaged with their upstream Open Source communities. That might be OpenStack, or ONAP, or even something like Open Daylight. This raises the obvious question – what makes a company well engaged with an upstream project? Read more over at my employer's blog...

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So you want to setup a Ceph dev environment using OSA

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Support for installing and configuring Ceph was added to openstack-ansible in Ocata, so now that I have a need for a Ceph development environment it seems logical that I would build it by building an openstack-ansible Ocata AIO. There were a few gotchas there, so I want to explain the process I used. First off, Ceph is enabled in an openstack-ansible AIO using a thing I've never seen before called a "Scenario". Basically this means that you need to export an environment variable called "SCENARIO" before running the AIO install. Something like this will do the trick?L: export SCENARIO=ceph Next you need to set the global pg_num in the ceph role or the install will fail. I did that with this patch: --- /etc/ansible/roles/ceph.ceph-common/defaults/main.yml 2017-05-26 08:55:07.803635173 +1000 +++ /etc/ansible/roles/ceph.ceph-common/defaults/main.yml 2017-05-26 08:58:30.417019878 +1000 @@ -338,7 +338,9 @@ # foo: 1234 # bar: 5678 # -ceph_conf_overrides: {} +ceph_conf_overrides: + global: + osd_pool_default_pg_num: 8 ############# @@ -373,4 +375,4 @@ # Set this to true to enable File access via NFS. Requires an MDS role. nfs_file_gw: true # Set this to true to enable Object access via NFS. Requires an RGW role. -nfs_obj_gw: false \ No newline at end of file +nfs_obj_gw: false That…

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Things I read today: the best description I’ve seen of metadata routing in neutron

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I happened upon a thread about OVN's proposal for how to handle nova metadata traffic, which linked to this very good Suse blog post about how metadata traffic is routed in neutron. I'm just adding the link here because I think it will be useful to others. The OVN proposal is also an interesting read.

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