Hi Karanbir,
I'm sorry I missed the office hours hangout, but I listened back over most of the discussion.
I've been thinking a bit about RDO, CentOS and the Cloud SIG and wanted to drop some thoughts here in case it helps the discussion.
The thing is - I'm hugely excited about the changes happening around CentOS and think there are great opportunities here. That said, I want to be realistic about what's likely to happen around CentOS and RDO in the medium term.
So, what does the RDO maintenance team care about?
- our focus is making a usable distro of vanilla OpenStack available on EL distros and persuade OpenStack users that EL is the best choice for running OpenStack than Ubuntu - i.e. we're talking about people who know they want (or want to try) OpenStack and we want to persuade them to use EL
- our instinct would be to show EL as rock-solid in terms of performance and stability even if that's at the expense of newer features. To me, that means replacing as little of the base distro as possible, especially the hypervisor bits. I'd be keen to make zero or very few modifications to the EL kernel, qemu and libvirt.
- to deliver RDO to date, we've been getting by using Fedora infrastructure but it would probably be a big improvement if we could switch over to CentOS infrastructure - e.g. koji, git, yum repos, etc.
- obviously there are other projects which aren't in the base OS that can be very useful to RDO users - e.g. Open vSwitch, Open Daylight, GlusterFS, Ceph, Docker, Xen, etc. If they were available through CentOS, we'd love to make it really easy for RDO users to use them.
- as an opt-in "preview" variant of RDO on CentOS, it would be really cool to have newer base OS features available for people to experiment with - I'd expect this to be fairly rapidly moving and not recommended for real-world use, though. I could definitely imagine the other IaaS projects having a similar need and some shared maintenance happening there.
- the difficulty with both of these is that - despite everyone's best intentions - RDO maintainers aren't necessarily going to be able to make a tonne of time to help out with either of them. Keeping up with OpenStack is enough of a challenge in itself.
- I don't imagine RDO folks being terrifically interested in doing work to make OpenStack co-exist on the same system or in the same distro with other IaaS project, just because it's a tonne of work and hard to imagine it helping users all that much. The "choose your own adventure" LiveCD idea does sound cool, but even that doesn't necessarily require all projects to live together in the same repo.
So, to summarize - the main things of interest to RDO folks would probably be:
- using CentOS koji, git and yum repos to build, maintain and deliver RDO
- builds of CentOS images for RDO users to run in their guests
- collaboration with other projects to experiment with and learn about e.g. packaging with SCLs (either packaging the apps themselves as SCLs, or just their dependency stacks)
- re-using any work other SIGs do around packaging and maintenance of other projects which will be useful to RDO users
- collaboration around the maintenance of a preview/experimental variant which includes newer base OS features which are particularly interesting for IaaS projects
I guess I'm curious whether other projects which have an interest in the Cloud SIG share a similar perspective?
For example, in the office hours chat I think there was an assumption that all of our projects need newer kernels, libvirt and qemu whereas I'd be worried about exposing RDO users to potential instability by doing that.
Thanks in advance, Mark.
On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 15:41 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Hi guys, we are getting ready to kick this off. The URLS you need for viewers are : youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKKYY_5SOWw and on google plus at https://plus.google.com/+CentOS
For the participants, I have just sent out emails with the url, if you dont have it - please come and find me on #centos-devel on irc.freenode.net
On 01/13/2014 09:56 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
hi,
I'd like to invite everyone wanting to contribute to the Cloud SIG and representing a project outside centos.org to come along for a chat on google hangout at the CentOS OfficeHours 23rd Jan 2014 @ 16:00 UTC.
Because we only have a few slots for people to talk, I've shortlisted these folks:
OpenStack: Mike Burns, Dave Neary, Rich Bowen Eucalyptus: Greg DK OpenNebula: Jaime Melis CloudStack: Sebastien Goasguen oVirt: Doron Fediuck
If you want to be on this list, please get in touch. If you are on this list but cant make it at that date/time, please nominate someone else in your place and let me know their email address so I can notify them of the url to join.
This will be a video/audio session and will be publicly broadcast over youtube/hangouts on air; the recording of the session will be available immediately after. Bonus cookies for everyone who turns up in their project tshirts!
You can see what time that is on your local timezone at this url : http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140123T16&am=...
About the session:
- Plan on an hour
- Every project should do a few minutes worth of a pitch about what they
would like to see as a good first goal and a good longer term goal.
- We can then discuss delivery mechanis, and how the forward maintenance
of the projects payload is going to work ( essentially, workout how the rpms will map to os/ and updates/ )
- Consider the workflow from git.centos.org ( KB to do a 5 min demo )
Regards,