I know I like Scalzi stuff, but each series is so different that I like them all in different ways. I don't think he's written a murder mystery before, and this book was just as good as Old Man's War, which is a pretty high bar. This book revolves around a murder being investigated by someone who can only interact with the real world via personal androids. Its different from anything else I've seen, and a unique idea is pretty rare these days. Highly recommended.
There's been a lot of talk recently about what we should include in OpenStack and what is out of scope. This is interesting, in that many of us used to believe that we should do ''everything''. I think what's changed is that we're learning that solving all the problems in the world is hard, and that we need to re-focus on our core products. In this post I want to talk through the various "layers" proposals that have been made in the last month or so. Layers don't directly address what we should include in OpenStack or not, but they are a useful mechanism for trying to break up OpenStack into simpler to examine chunks, and I think that makes them useful in their own right. I would address what I believe the scope of the OpenStack project should be, but I feel that it makes this post so long that no one will ever actually read it. Instead, I'll cover that in a later post in this series. For now, let's explore what people are proposing as a layering model for OpenStack. What are layers? Dean Troyer did a good job of describing a layers model for the OpenStack…
As we get closer to releasing the RC1 of Nova for Juno, I've started collecting a list of all the blueprints we implemented in Juno. This was mostly done because it helps me write the release notes, but I am posting it here because I am sure that others will find it handy too. Process Reserve 10 sql schema version numbers for back ports of Juno migrations to Icehouse. launchpad specification Ongoing behind the scenes work Object conversion Convert the compute manager to use nova objects. launchpad specification Convert EC2 API to use nova objects. launchpad specification Start converting hypervisor drivers to use objects. launchpad specification Scheduler Support sub-classing objects. launchpad specification Stop using the scheduler run_instance method. Previously the scheduler would select a host, and then boot the instance. Instead, let the scheduler select hosts, but then return those so the caller boots the instance. This will make it easier to move the scheduler to being a generic service instead of being internal to nova. launchpad specification Refactor the nova scheduler into being a library. This will make splitting the scheduler out into its own service later easier. launchpad specification Move nova to using the v2 cinder API. launchpad…
This is a just a quick list of the posts I wrote summarizing the Juno Nova mid-cycle meetup in the right order to read them, because I didn't actually have that online before. I needed to send this list to someone, so I figured its easier to just post it here. Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: social issues Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: containers Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: ironic Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: DB2 support Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: cells Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: scheduler Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: slots Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: nova-network to Neutron migration Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: the next generation Nova API Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: conclusion
This is mostly historical at this point, but I forgot to post it here when I emailed it a week or so ago. So, for future reference: I'd like another term as Compute PTL, if you'll have me. We live in interesting times. openstack has clearly gained a large amount of mind share in the open cloud marketplace, with Nova being a very commonly deployed component. Yet, we don't have a fantastic container solution, which is our biggest feature gap at this point. Worse -- we have a code base with a huge number of bugs filed against it, an unreliable gate because of subtle bugs in our code and interactions with other openstack code, and have a continued need to add features to stay relevant. These are hard problems to solve. Interestingly, I think the solution to these problems calls for a social approach, much like I argued for in my Juno PTL candidacy email. The problems we face aren't purely technical -- we need to work out how to pay down our technical debt without blocking all new features. We also need to ask for understanding and patience from those feature authors as we try and improve the…
This book is quite readable, which surprises me for the relatively dry topic. Whilst obviously not everyone will agree with the author's thesis, it is clear that IBM hasn't been managed for long term success in a long time and there are a lot of very unhappy employees. The book is an interesting perspective on a complicated problem.
There's been a lot of content in this series about the Juno Nova mid-cycle meetup, so thanks to those who followed along with me. I've also received a lot of positive feedback about the posts, so I am thinking the exercise is worthwhile, and will try to be more organized for the next mid-cycle (and therefore get these posts out earlier). To recap quickly, here's what was covered in the series: The first post in the series covered social issues: things like how we organized the mid-cycle meetup, how we should address core reviewer burnout, and the current state of play of the Juno release. Bug management has been an ongoing issue for Nova for a while, so we talked about bug management. We are making progress on this issue, but more needs to be done and it's going to take a lot of help for everyone to get there. There was also discussion about proposals on how to handle review workload in the Kilo release, although nothing has been finalized yet. The second post covered the current state of play for containers in Nova, as well as our future direction. Unexpectedly, this was by far the most read post…
This is the final post in my series covering the highlights from the Juno Nova mid-cycle meetup. In this post I will cover our next generation API, which used to be called the v3 API but is largely now referred to as the v2.1 API. Getting to this point has been one of the more painful processes I think I've ever seen in Nova's development history, and I think we've learnt some important things about how large distributed projects operate along the way. My hope is that we remember these lessons next time we hit something as contentious as our API re-write has been. Now on to the API itself. It started out as an attempt to improve our current API to be more maintainable and less confusing to our users. We deliberately decided that we would not focus on adding features, but instead attempt to reduce as much technical debt as possible. This development effort went on for about a year before we realized we'd made a mistake. The mistake we made is that we assumed that our users would agree it was trivial to move to a new API, and that they'd do that even if there weren't…
I read this book while on a flight a few weeks ago. Its surprisingly readable and relatively short -- you can knock it over in a single long haul flight. The book covers the memoirs of an oil rig worker, from childhood right through to middle age. That's probably the biggest weakness of the book, it just kind of stops when the writer reaches the present day. I felt there wasn't really a conclusion, which was disappointing. An interesting fun read however.
This will be my second last post about the Juno Nova mid-cycle meetup, which covers the state of play for work on the nova-network to Neutron upgrade. First off, some background information. Neutron (formerly Quantum) was developed over a long period of time to replace nova-network, and added to the OpenStack Folsom release. The development of new features for nova-network was frozen in the Nova code base, so that users would transition to Neutron. Unfortunately the transition period took longer than expected. We ended up having to unfreeze development of nova-network, in order to fix reliability problems that were affecting our CI gating and the reliability of deployments for existing nova-network users. Also, at least two OpenStack companies were carrying significant feature patches for nova-network, which we wanted to merge into the main code base. You can see the announcement at http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-January/025824.html. The main enhancements post-freeze were a conversion to use our new objects infrastructure (and therefore conductor), as well as features that were being developed by Nebula. I can't find any contributions from the other OpenStack company in the code base at this time, so I assume they haven't been proposed. The nova-network to Neutron migration path has come…