The first public commit to what would become OpenStack Nova was made ten years ago today — at Thu May 27 23:05:26 2010 PDT to be exact. So first off, happy tenth birthday to Nova!
A lot has happened in that time — OpenStack has gone from being two separate Open Source projects to a whole ecosystem, developers have come and gone (and passed away), and OpenStack has weathered the cloud wars of the last decade. OpenStack survived its early growth phase by deliberately offering a “big tent” to the community and associated vendors, with an expansive definition of what should be included. This has resulted in most developers being associated with a corporate sponser, and hence the decrease in the number of developers today as corporate interest wanes — OpenStack has never been great at attracting or retaining hobbist contributors.
My personal involvement with OpenStack started in November 2011, so while I missed the very early days I was around for a lot and made many of the mistakes that I now see in OpenStack.
What do I see as mistakes in OpenStack in hindsight? Well, embracing vendors who later lose interest has been painful, and has increased the complexity of the code base significantly. Nova itself is now nearly 400,000 lines of code, and that’s after splitting off many of the original features of Nova such as block storage and networking. Additionally, a lot of our initial assumptions are no longer true — for example in many cases we had to write code to implement things, where there are now good libraries available from third parties.
That’s not to say that OpenStack is without value — I am a daily user of OpenStack to this day, and use at least three OpenStack public clouds at the moment. That said, OpenStack is a complicated beast with a lot of legacy that makes it hard to maintain and slow to change.
For at least six months I’ve felt the desire for a simpler cloud orchestration layer — both for my own personal uses, and also as a test bed for ideas for what a smaller, simpler cloud might look like. My personal use case involves a relatively small environment which echos what we now think of as edge compute — less than 10 RU of machines with a minimum of orchestration and management overhead.
At the time that I was thinking about these things, the Australian bushfires and COVID-19 came along, and presented me with a lot more spare time than I had expected to have. While I’m still blessed to be employed, all of my social activities have been cancelled, so I find myself at home at a loose end on weekends and evenings at lot more than before.
Thus Shaken Fist was born — named for a Simpson’s meme, Shaken Fist is a deliberately small and highly opinionated cloud implementation aimed at working well in small deployments such as homes, labs, edge compute locations, deployed systems, and so forth.
I’d taken a bit of trouble with each feature in Shaken Fist to think through what the simplest and highest value way of doing something is. For example, instances always get a config drive and there is no metadata server. There is also only one supported type of virtual networking, and one supported hypervisor. That said, this means Shaken Fist is less than 5,000 lines of code, and small enough that new things can be implemented very quickly by a single middle aged developer.
Shaken Fist definitely has feature gaps — API authentication and scheduling are the most obvious at the moment — but I have plans to fill those when the time comes.
I’m not sure if Shaken Fist is useful to others, but you never know. Its apache2 licensed, and available on github if you’re interested.