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These topics may seem like strange bedfellows, but trust me: there's a method to my madness. Originally this was going to be part of my Berlin summit post, but as I was writing it got rather long and I started to feel it was important enough to deserve a standalone post. Since there are two separate but related topics here, I've split the post. If you're interested in my technical thoughts on upstream performance testing, read on. If you're only interested in the click-baity release-shaming part, feel free to skip to that section. It mostly stands on its own.

Since there was only one Oslo session and a couple of Designate sessions that I was able to attend, this update is going to be a bit of a grab-bag of topics. Hopefully I have some interesting thoughts on them. :-)

In a previous post I discussed my trials and tribulations integrating Google Calendar with Thunderbird. Unfortunately the Lightning plugin doesn't work with my corporate calendar, so I had to find another solution. Sadly, after my latest Thunderbird update the alternate plugin I was using no longer works.

This is an announcement that we recently merged a new feature to oslo.config for validating the contents of config files. This has been an oft-requested feature, but in the past it was difficult to implement because config opts are registered dynamically at runtime and there's no good way to know for sure when all of them are present.

The time has come to declare a 1.0 version for OVB. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. OVB has been stable for quite a while
2. It's time to start dropping support for ancient behaviors/clouds

This is just a quick update to note that this blog migrated to a new host last night. Everything seems to have gone pretty smoothly, other than the fact that they didn't tell me when they were going to do it and shut down the old host immediately. As a result, there was some downtime. If you do happen to notice anything still not working correctly please let me know.

This was the first repeat OpenStack Summit location for me. While there have been repeat locations in the past, I wasn't at the first Summit at any of those locations. I think that means I'm getting old. :-)

There was a lot that had changed, and also a lot that stayed the same. The Vancouver Convention Center is still a fantastic venue, with plenty of space for sessions. And although I did attend all of the Oslo sessions, just like last time, we didn't over-schedule Oslo this time so I had a chance to attend some non-Oslo sessions as well. Since I'm also focusing on Designate these days, I made sure to catch all of those sessions, even the one at 5:30 PM on Thursday when everyone was a bit tired and ready to leave. And it was good - there was useful information in that presentation. I felt more productive at this Summit than last time, which is certainly a good thing.

With the intro out of the way, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of the sessions I attended.

Background

At long last, OVB has reached the goal we set for it way back when it was more idea than reality. The plan was to come up with a system where we could test baremetal deployment against OpenStack instances in an arbitrary cloud. That would allow something like TripleO CI to scale, for all practical purposes, infinitely. For years this wasn't possible because OVB required some configuration and/or hacks that were not appropriate for production clouds, which limited it to use in specific CI-oriented clouds. Theoretically it has been possible to use OVB on normal clouds for a couple of years now, but in practice public clouds were either running OpenStack versions that were too old or didn't expose the necessary features. Fortunately, this is no longer true.

It seems like every time I try to access the remote console on one of my old DRAC 5's, something fails. The latest failure was kind of new and I didn't find any blog posts specifically discussing it, so I'm writing one. The error was the classic "Error when reading from ssl socket connection". But the usual fixes didn't work.

The title is a bit dramatic, but I'm bad at naming things and that's the name of the project I'm writing about today.

As with many people, I like my todo list to be very low overhead. I don't want a huge task tracking system with all the bells and whistles. Those are for management's benefit. I want a list of things that I need to do and a way to keep track of which ones I've completed. If my todo list has a lot of overhead then I won't use it consistently and it becomes worse than useless because it provides a false sense of security that I'm tracking all the work I need to do. There are a million todo apps out there, but none that I've found were able to satisfy my desire for minimalism.

So I wrote my own (Deja vu much?)