Made by Mikal – Page 18

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

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 30, 2018
Post category:ONAP OpenStack

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…

Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 24, 2018
Post category:Conference OpenStack Presentations Python Security

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.

(more…)

city2surf 2018 wrap up

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 13, 2018
Post category:Running

city2surf 2018 was yesterday, so how did the race go? First off, thanks to everyone who helped out with my fund raising for the Black Dog Institute -- you raised nearly $2,000 AUD for this important charity, which is very impressive. Thanks for everyone's support! city2surf is 14kms, with 166 meters of vertical elevation gain. For the second year running I was in the green start group, which is for people who have previously finished the event in less than 90 minutes. There is one start group before this, red, which is for people who can finish in less than 70 minutes. In reality I think its unlikely that I'll ever make it to red -- it would require me to shave about 30 seconds per kilometre off my time to just scrape in, and I think that would be hard to do. Training for city2surf last year I tore my right achilles, so I was pretty much starting from scratch for this years event -- at the start of the year I could run about 50 meters before I had issues. Luckily I was referred to an excellent physiotherapist who has helped me build back up safely -- I…

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

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 23, 2018
Post category:Conference Linux OpenStack

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/

Rejected talk proposal: Design at scale: OpenStack versus Kubernetes

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 17, 2018
Post category:Conference OpenStack Python

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…)

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

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 17, 2018
Post category:OpenStack

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.

(more…)

Mirroring all your repos from github

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 6, 2018
Post category:Uncategorized

So let me be clear here, I don't think its a bad thing that Microsoft bought github. No one is forcing you to use their services, in fact they make it trivial to stop using them. So what's the big deal. I've posted about a few git mirror scripts I run at home recently: one to mirror gerrit repos; and one to mirror arbitrary github users. It was therefore trivial to whip up a slightly nicer script intended to help you forklift your repos out of github if you're truly concerned. Its posted on github now (irony intended). Now you can just do something like: $ pip install -U -r requirements.txt $ python download.py --github_token=foo --username=mikalstill I intend to add support for auto-creating and importing gitlab repos into the script, but haven't gotten around to that yet. Pull requests welcome.

How to maintain a local mirror of github repositories

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2018
Post category:Uncategorized

Similarly to yesterday’s post about mirroring ONAP’s git, I also want to mirror all of the git repositories for certain github projects. In this specific case, all of the Kubernetes repositories.

So once again, here is a script based on something Tony Breeds and I cooked up a long time ago for OpenStack…

(more…)

How to maintain a local mirror of ONAP’s git repositories

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 17, 2018
Post category:ONAP

For various reasons, I like to maintain a local mirror of git repositories I use a lot, in this case ONAP. This is mostly because of the generally poor network connectivity in Australia, but its also because it makes cloning a new repository super fast.

Tony Breeds and I baked up a script to do this for OpenStack repositories a while ago. I therefore present a version of that mirror script which does the right thing for ONAP projects.

(more…)

Head On

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 12, 2018
Post category:Book

A sequel to Lock In, this book is a quick and fun read of a murder mystery. It has Scalzi's distinctive style which has generally meshed quite well for me, so it's not surprise that I enjoyed this book.