Hello all,
    I would like to start a discussion around the relationship between IaaS
and PaaS as topics for the CentOS Cloud SIG.
   
Should we have one SIG with "sub-SIGs"? Separate SIGs for each? or some
other variation?

    A little background, I'm a member of the OpenShift team at Red Hat and we
work heavily on OpenShift Origin[0] which is our upstream project. We've in the
past focused on RHEL and Fedora as our primary development platforms.
With the recently announced partnership with CentOS, we're all looking forward
to working  with the CentOS community and making OpenShift Origin, the open
source Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, available on CentOS and
collaborating with the community around the platform.

We would like to pair our upstream code base with a community-centric
distribution featuring an Enterprise Linux release cadence making
CentOS + OpenShift Origin a natural fit for community members seeking the
latest in Open Source PaaS but not necessarily a cutting edge Operating
System.

That's the background, but the reason I am bringing this up as a topic of
discussion is mostly because I'd like to try and plan for the future as well
as accommodate the present.
 
At present, OpenShift Origin will run anywhere CentOS will run such as
bare metal, VM on your laptop, VM in oVirt/VMWare, or a private cloud instance
on CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, or OpenStack (listed alphabetically) or
even public cloud provider instances like AWS,  Google Compute Engine, or
RackSpace OpenCloud (again, alphabetical). This is a feature we pride
ourselves on but there are also plans to add plugins either into OpenShift or
into IaaS platforms to add some fuctionality for auto scaling, load balancing,
routing, etc. which brings me to the point which is where the lines between
IaaS and PaaS start to blur.

As many of you may know, during the last OpenStack summit, a group of
companies announced the Solum project[1], which effectively provides a PaaS
integration point into OpenStack. The OpenShift engineering team is
participating in the Solum effort in an attempt to not duplicate work as well
as to ensure have OpenShift is one of the PaaS providers on the forefront of
this new OpenStack technology. Solum is still in the early phases, but it's
certainly showing promise and from current impressions this appears to be a
bridge between IaaS and PaaS. While this is only one example of some of the
convergence that's possible, it's a real world example that I thought was
worth bringing up for this discussion.

This brings me back around to my original question, should we combine both
PaaS and IaaS under the same umbrella SIG? Or does everyone think the two
cloud service models differ enough to warrant separate SIG space?

Or possibly another scenario I've not thought of?

As an aside, I assume we could package them separately and allow users to
enable CentOS repositories as they desire to install/setup/configure/deploy
IaaS+PaaS and we could keep the logically separated that way but didn't want
to make a rash assumption for the group and jump the gun with a CentOS PaaS
SIG propsal.

All that said, we're looking forward to offering up OpenShift Origin on the
coming Cloud variants of CentOS distributions as well as supporting CentOS 6.5
as a deployment option for OpenShift Origin today[2][3].

Thoughts? Qustions? Comments?

Thanks,

-AdamM
maxamillion on irc.freenode.net
@TheMaxamillion on twiiter


[0] - http://openshift.github.io/
[1] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Solum
[2] - https://install.openshift.com/
[3] - http://openshift.github.io/documentation/#documentation