Reflecting on Essex
This post is kind of long, and a little self indulgent. However, I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I did for the Essex release cycle, and what I want to do for the Folsom release. I spent Essex mostly hacking on things in isolation, except for when Padraig Brady and I were hacking in a similar space. I'd like to collaborate more for Folsom, and I'm hoping talking about what I'm interested in doing in public might help with that. I came relatively late to the Essex development cycle, having never even heard of OpenStack before joining Canonical. We can talk about how I'd worked in the cloud space for six years and yet wasn't aware of the open source implementations at some other time. My initial introduction to OpenStack was being paged for compute nodes which were continually running out of disk. I googled around a bit and discovered that cached images for instances were never cleaned up (to start an instance, an image is fetched from glance, possibly has its format converted, is resized, and then an instance started with that resulting image, all those images were never being cleaned up). I filed bug…