Shaken Fist

Rejected talk proposal: Shaken Fist, thought experiments in simpler IaaS clouds

This proposal was submitted for FOSDEM 2021. Given that acceptances were meant to be sent out on 25 December and its basically a week later I think we can assume that its been rejected. I've recently been writing up my rejected proposals, partially because I've put in the effort to write them and they might be useful elsewhere, but also because I think its important to demonstrate that its not unusual for experienced speakers to be rejected from these events. OpenStack today is a complicated beast -- not only does it try to perform well for large clusters, but it also embraces a diverse set of possible implementations from hypervisors, storage, networking, and more. This was a deliberate tactical choice made by the OpenStack community years ago, forming a so called "Big Tent" for vendors to collaborate in to build Open Source cloud options. It made a lot of sense at the time to be honest. However, OpenStack today finds itself constrained by the large number of permutations it must support, ten years of software and backwards compatability legacy, and a decreasing investment from those same vendors that OpenStack courted so actively. Shaken Fist makes a series of simplifying assumptions…

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Shaken Fist 0.2.0

The other day we released Shaken Fist version 0.2, and I never got around to announcing it here. In fact, we've done a minor release since then and have another minor release in the wings ready to go out in the next day or so. So what's changed in Shaken Fist between version 0.1 and 0.2? Well, actually kind of a lot... We moved from MySQL to etcd for storage of persistant state. This was partially done because we wanted distributed locking, but it was also because MySQL was a pain to work with. We rearranged our repositories -- the main repository is now in its own github organisation, and the golang REST client, terrform provider, and deployment tooling have moved into their own repositories in that organisation. There is also a prototype javascript client now as well. Some work has gone into making the API service more production grade, although there is still some work to be done there probably in the 0.3 release -- specifically there is a timeout if a response takes more than 300 seconds, which can be the case in launch large VMs where the disk images are not in cache. There were also some…

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Introducing Shaken Fist

The first public commit to what would become OpenStack Nova was made ten years ago today -- at Thu May 27 23:05:26 2010 PDT to be exact. So first off, happy tenth birthday to Nova! A lot has happened in that time -- OpenStack has gone from being two separate Open Source projects to a whole ecosystem, developers have come and gone (and passed away), and OpenStack has weathered the cloud wars of the last decade. OpenStack survived its early growth phase by deliberately offering a "big tent" to the community and associated vendors, with an expansive definition of what should be included. This has resulted in most developers being associated with a corporate sponser, and hence the decrease in the number of developers today as corporate interest wanes -- OpenStack has never been great at attracting or retaining hobbist contributors. My personal involvement with OpenStack started in November 2011, so while I missed the very early days I was around for a lot and made many of the mistakes that I now see in OpenStack. What do I see as mistakes in OpenStack in hindsight? Well, embracing vendors who later lose interest has been painful, and has increased the…

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