Three Things I Learned on Day 1 of the OpenStack Summit

1. Defcore is Totally Vanilla and it’s about to get REAL

Defcore is indeed Vanilla OpenStack. That is what panel participants conceded when asked about it in the Defcore session I attended yesterday. They don’t necessarily love the characterization (apparently they’re asked it on a regular basis), but bottom line: that’s what it is. It’s a spec to start out with to build your own implementation of OpenStack. “Add all the great things you want on top of it,” one of the panelists enthused. Another opined, “It’s the spoon that makes sure you can eat your OpenStack ice cream. We are the minimal needed to have a working, interoperable stack.”

Also important to know about Defcore: They’ve spent a lot of time coming to agreement about principles and process, and the next six months will be about beginning to implement those things. Which is to say, “We’re going to have to tell a lot of people ‘No,’” in the words of one of the panelists. “That’s what’s going to start happening.” The panelists reminded audience members that they need their participation to make fair decisions and that this is a community, so it’s time to influence the process if this issue is important to you.

2. Swift is getting pretty fancy

Yesterday was the 5^th anniversary of Swift being in production, and its latest release includes a bunch of features that take it way beyond being a simple data-retrieval mechanism. They include:

• Listings: Limits, markers, delimiters, and prefixes allow you to sort what you have stored, so you can pull all the files you want and none that you don’t.
• TempURLs: As the name implies, these addresses are temporary. Good for 30 seconds, 60, 120, you decide. The great thing is you can use them to allow uploads or downloads from otherwise untrusted users without worrying that they can pass your address along to others.
• Form Post: Allows you to create an html form quickly and easily for more efficient data gathering.
• Static Websites: Delivers a better whole site user experience by giving you the ability to deal with nested directories, auto-redirect, and auto-generated websites, with zero external dependencies.
• CORS: Cross origin research sharing. It’s a browser thing. Allows code that is running in the browser to make requests to other domain names.
• Extract archives: Backups are a huge case for Swift. This feature allows you to compress archived files during transport and decompress them at their destination.
• Large objects: Swift normally has a limit of 5GB for an object. But sometimes you need to get around that. This new feature allows you to do that by storing one object within Swift that then references another object or series of objects.

3. You Have to Change Your Thinking to Understand the Big Tent Initiative

In the past the important question when evaluating new projects for inclusion was: “Is this OpenStack?”

Now, it’s “Are you OpenStack?”

It’s an acknowledgement that people are actually what make OpenStack real, and that if the people working on a particular project are following certain guidelines, they deserve to be able to call that project by the OpenStack name and encourage others to join them in their work on it.

These are the guidelines:

1. They (the people behind the new project) align with the OpenStack Mission. Should help further it by providing a cloud infrastructure service or directly building on an existing infra service.
2. They follow the OpenStack way: Open source, open community, open development, open design
3. They ensure basic interoperability: API services should support at least Keystone
4. They submit to the TC oversight

So the community is getting bigger, and fast. New members include: MagnetoDB, Murano, Mistral, Magnum, Congress, Rally, Puppet Modules, OpenStack Client, and Security.

Other Big Tent-related changes: There will be no more integrated releases. There will instead be opt-in coordinated releases at the end of each cycle. And it’s not a free-for-all. The TC still gets a final Yes or No on whether projects are in or out.