Denver Summit Recap

Just back from the Denver Summit and PTG, so here are my thoughts about the Summit. I expect to post my PTG wrapup to the openstack-discuss mailing list since it's more developer-specific.

Overall, I feel good about this one. It seemed like I had interesting sessions to attend almost every block for the three days. This hasn't always been the case for me at past Summits so it was a definite positive for this one. I will note that I was in a much happier place than I have been at some previous events, so it's possible this was just a perception change on my end. Looking through my list of attended sessions, I feel like they were legitimately interesting though.

Oslo

As PTL, this was obviously the main thing I was there for. We did a project update, and I also had a lot of good discussions with other folks in the community who were interested in contributing to Oslo. While I've had people approach me before, it felt like it happened quite a bit more at this Summit than previous ones. Fingers crossed that this will lead to an increase in Oslo contributors. :-)

Metal³

Metal Kubed was included in the keynote demos and kept coming up throughout the week as something people were interested in. This is good since it's the primary thing I'm working on these days. :-)

Keystone

I spent a bunch of time in Keystone sessions during the week. A lot of the discussions went way over my head, but there is quite a bit of work going on around policy and quota. Both of those involve Oslo libraries so they're relevant to my interests. The Oslo side of the policy work is done as far as I know, but currently the oslo.limit library for quota enforcement is essentially a bare cookiecutter repo. Plans were made at the Forum and PTG to move that along and I'm feeling good about where we're headed. You can find a bunch more details in the cross-project session etherpad.

Thanks to the Keystone team for tolerating me all week and thanks to the Nova team for some excellent cross-project sessions on policy and quota.

Services as Libraries

I attended a session that was trying to address how to deal with cross-project feature dependencies, i.e. when a feature proposed for one project depends on a feature recently added to a service. Currently this is problematic because services tend to be released only at major milestones during the cycle, so testing new features like this requires installing from source. A couple of options were floated:

• Split the services into "service" and "service-lib". This would allow us to continue treating the services themselves the same way we do now, but release the -lib version more often. However, it also requires a non-trivial amount of refactoring work.
• Treat the services as libraries and release them more often. The positive side of this strategy is that it doesn't require any real code changes in the services. The downside is that it might result in a number of major releases during a cycle as services remove deprecated features and such. This isn't a huge problem, but it might be confusing for people who are used to one major version bump per release. There's also the potential that releasing mid-cycle might result in partially complete features showing up in a release, but hopefully that can be mitigated by coordinating releases with the project teams.

Some followup discussion is planned with the affected services to determine whether they have the bandwidth to take on a large refactoring or if they would prefer the second option.

Storyboard

We've been looking at the Storyboard migration pretty much since I started as Oslo PTL, and this cycle one of the major blockers (lack of priority migration from Launchpad) was addressed. \o/

There are a few remaining concerns though. Attachment support is still WIP, search syntax is still mystifying to most users, and it sounds like there are some growing pains happening on the database side. The first two have plans in place to make progress, but it was mentioned that there is a lack of database optimization knowledge on the current Storyboard team. If you or someone you know have experience in this area and would like to help I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

Technical Vision Review

I sat in on this session mostly out of general interest since Oslo is excluded from the scope of the document and thus didn't do a vision review. However, it was pointed out that there may still be value in doing one since there are elements of the vision that Oslo could still contribute to. I (or someone else ;-) will have to take a second look.

Other than that, the majority of the session was discussing the value of the review and how to encourage the projects that haven't done one yet to do so. There were some interesting proposals in the session etherpad about how to make it easier to do the review process, which will hopefully help.

Autoscaling at Blizzard

I don't have a whole lot to add to this talk, other than the fact that if you didn't see it live you should go watch the replay when it's up. Blizzard is doing a lot of things right with OpenStack, and this is one of them.

PTL Tips and Tricks

This session went better than I dared hope. We pretty much filled the 40 minutes with quality discussion of how to be the best PTL you can be. I was able to share some of my knowledge and also learned quite a bit, including at least one thing that I will be implementing for Oslo soon (an alternative to courtesy ping lists in IRC meetings). This really deserves a separate writeup, but in the meantime you can see the etherpad for details about the discussion.

Image Encryption

Good news everyone: Oslo is no longer involved. ;-)

Actually, the real good news is that major progress was made on this. Getting a bunch of smart people together in a single room to discuss it was very helpful and it sounds like we have a workable plan to move this forward. It will no doubt still be an enormous amount of work since it crosses so many projects, but at least there weren't any clear blockers left at the end of the session. Major props to Josephine (Luzi) for sticking with this despite all of the delays.

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, I came out of this Summit feeling good about what we got accomplished. It seemed like most sessions were making progress and not getting stuck on bikeshedding or fundamental disagreements about the direction projects should be moving. I hope we can keep up that momentum throughout the cycle and have another good Summit in Shanghai.