[CentOS-devel] Wider conversation around process and delivery for the Cloud SIG

>
> 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.
>


Hi Mark:

So while I agree stability is important; all of the cloud projects are
moving rapidly.
CentOS (or really I suppose EL6 in general) is the de facto home for
CloudStack, and while we like the stability, many features simply
don't work on EL6 because the base OS is comparatively ancient. The
risk is EL6 being irrelevant as an underlying platform. Wanting to use
OVS, VXLAN, Nicira NVP on EL6 in any real usable situation is well
nigh impossible. Want to consume Ceph RBD, GlusterFS for KVM volumes
and the kernel/libvirt/qemu issues inhibit this.

I personally don't see a huge benefit from just using the CentOS yum
repos. Yum repos are effectively a commodity; and you aren't getting
away from reading documentation to get going regardless of platform,
so enabling a CentOS-hosted repo over a CloudStack-hosted repo doesn't
really gain me much.

Interestingly, the cloud philosophy seems to be an extension of the
Continuous Delivery mindset, which focuses on not trying to freeze
'perfection' but being agile enough and having enough testing in place
to verify that there is some minimal guarantee of functionality while
progress continues forward.

--David