April 8, 2015

OVN and OpenStack Integration Development Update

The Open vSwitch project announced the OVN effort back in January. After OVN was announced, I got very interested in its potential. OVN is by no means tied to OpenStack, but the primary reason I’m interested is I see it as a promising open source backend for OpenStack Neutron. To put it into context with existing Neutron code, it would replace the OVS agent in Neutron in the short term. It would eventually also replace the L3 and DHCP agents once OVN gains the equivalent functionality.

March 10, 2015

The Different Facets of OpenStack HA

Last October, I wrote about a particular aspect of providing HA for workloads running on OpenStack. The HA problem space for OpenStack is much more broad than what was addressed there. There has been a lot of work around HA for the OpenStack services themselves. The problems for OpenStack services seem to be pretty well understood. There are reference architectures with detailed instructions available from vendors and distributions that have been integrated into deployment tools.

October 15, 2014

OpenStack Instance HA Proposal

In a perfect world, every workload that runs on OpenStack would be a cloud native application that is horizontally scalable and fault tolerant to anything that may cause a VM to go down. However, the reality is quite different. We continue to see a high demand for support of traditional workloads running on top of OpenStack and the HA expectations that come with them. Traditional applications run on top of OpenStack just fine for the most part.

September 26, 2014

OpenStack Board Meeting - 2014-09-18

I’m not a member of the OpenStack board, but the board meetings are open with the exception of the occasional Executive Session for topics that really do need to be private. I attended the meeting on September 18, 2014. Jonathan Bryce has since posted a summary of the meeting, but I wanted to share some additional commentary. Mid-Cycle Meetups Rob Hirschfeld raised the topic of mid-cycle meetups. This wasn’t discussed for too long in the meeting.

September 26, 2014

PTLs and Project Success in OpenStack

We’re in the middle of another PTL change cycle. Nominations have occurred over the last week. We’ve also seen several people step down this cycle (Keystone, TripleO, Cinder, Heat, Glance). This is becoming a regular thing in OpenStack. The PTL position for most projects has changed hands over time. The Heat project changes every cycle. Nova has its 3rd PTL from a 3rd company (about to enter his 2nd cycle). With all of this change, some people express some amount of discomfort and concern.

July 7, 2014

Juno Preview for OpenStack Compute (Nova)

We’re now well into the Juno release cycle. Here’s my take on a preview of some of what you can expect in Juno for Nova. NFV One area receiving a lot of focus this cycle is NFV. We’ve started an upstream NFV sub-team for OpenStack that is tracking and helping to drive requirements and development efforts in support of NFV use cases. If you’re not familiar with NFV, here’s a quick overview that was put together by the NFV sub-team:

May 21, 2013

Availability Zones and Host Aggregates in OpenStack Compute (Nova)

UPDATE 2014-06-18: There was a talk at the last OpenStack Summit in Atlanta on this topic, Divide and Conquer: Resource Segregation in the OpenStack Cloud. Confusion around Host Aggregates and Availabaility Zones in Nova seems to be very common. In this post I’ll attempt to show how each are used. All information in this post is based on the way things work in the Grizzly version of Nova. First, go ahead and forget everything you know about things called Availability Zones in other systems.

May 13, 2013

OpenStack Compute (Nova) Roadmap for Havana

The Havana design summit was held mid-April. Since then we have been documenting the Havana roadmap and going full speed ahead on development of these features. The list of features that developers have committed to completing for the Havana release is tracked using blueprints on Launchpad. At the time of writing, we have 74 blueprints listed that cover a wide range of development efforts. Here are some highlights in no particular order:

February 19, 2013

Deployment Considerations for nova-conductor Service in OpenStack Grizzly

The Grizzly release of OpenStack Nova includes a new service, nova-conductor. Some previous posts about this service can be found here and here. This post is intended to provide some additional insight into how this service should be deployed and how the service should be scaled as load increases. Smaller OpenStack Compute deployments typically consist of a single controller node and one or more compute (hypervisor) nodes. The nova-conductor service fits in the category of controller services.

December 7, 2012

Installing Steam for Linux Beta on Fedora 17

UPDATE: Since the original post, the download of Team Fortress 2 completed and I hit a problem. The post has been amended with the solution. It sounds like a lot more people got access to the Steam for Linux beta yesterday, including me. An announcement on steamcommunity.com says: We’ve just expanded the limited public beta by a large amount - which means another round of email notifications - so check your inbox!