This will be my second last post about the Juno Nova mid-cycle meetup, which covers the state of play for work on the nova-network to Neutron upgrade.
First off, some background information. Neutron (formerly Quantum) was developed over a long period of time to replace nova-network, and added to the OpenStack Folsom release. The development of new features for nova-network was frozen in the Nova code base, so that users would transition to Neutron. Unfortunately the transition period took longer than expected. We ended up having to unfreeze development of nova-network, in order to fix reliability problems that were affecting our CI gating and the reliability of deployments for existing nova-network users. Also, at least two OpenStack companies were carrying significant feature patches for nova-network, which we wanted to merge into the main code base.
You can see the announcement at http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-January/025824.html. The main enhancements post-freeze were a conversion to use our new objects infrastructure (and therefore conductor), as well as features that were being developed by Nebula. I can’t find any contributions from the other OpenStack company in the code base at this time, so I assume they haven’t been proposed.
The nova-network to Neutron migration path has come to the attention of the OpenStack Technical Committee, who have asked for a more formal plan to address Neutron feature gaps and deprecate nova-network. That plan is tracked at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/TechnicalCommittee/Neutron_Gap_Coverage. As you can see, there are still some things to be merged which are targeted for juno-3. At the time of writing this includes grenade testing; Neutron being the devstack default; a replacement for nova-network multi-host; a migration plan; and some documentation. They are all making good progress, but until these action items are completed, Nova can’t start the process of deprecating nova-network.
The discussion at the Nova mid-cycle meetup was around the migration planning item in the plan. There is a Nova specification that outlines one possible plan for live upgrading instances (i.e, no instance downtime) at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/101921/, but this will probably now be replaced with a simpler migration path involving cold migrations. This is prompted by not being able to find a user that absolutely has to have live upgrade. There was some confusion, because of a belief that the TC was requiring a live upgrade plan. But as Russell Bryant says in the meetup etherpad:
“Note that the TC has made no such statement on migration expectations other than a migration path must exist, both projects must agree on the plan, and that plan must be submitted to the TC as a part of the project’s graduation review (or project gap review in this case). I wouldn’t expect the TC to make much of a fuss about the plan if both Nova and Neutron teams are in agreement.”
The current plan is to go forward with a cold upgrade path, unless a user comes forward with an absolute hard requirement for a live upgrade, and a plan to fund developers to work on it.
At this point, it looks like we are on track to get all of the functionality we need from Neutron in the Juno release. If that happens, we will start the nova-network deprecation timer in Kilo, with my expectation being that nova-network would be removed in the “M” release. There is also an option to change the default networking implementation to Neutron before the deprecation of nova-network is complete, which will mean that new deployments are defaulting to the long term supported option.
In the next (and probably final) post in this series, I’ll talk about the API formerly known as Nova API v3.