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