Summiting continued! The final three days of the conference offered two days of OpenStack Design Summit discussions and working sessions on specific topics, and Friday was spent doing a contributors meetup so we could have face time with people we’re working with on projects.

Wednesday began with a team breakfast, where over 30 of us descended upon a breakfast restaurant and had a lively morning. Unfortunately it ran a bit long and made us a bit late for the beginning of summit stuff, but the next Infrastructure work session was fully attended! The session sought to take some next steps with our activity tracking mechanisms, none of which are currently part of the OpenStack Infrastructure. Currently there are several different types of stats being collected, from reviewstats which are hosted by a community member and focus specifically on reviews to those produced from Bitergia (here) that are somewhat generic but help compare OpenStack to other open source projects to Stackalytics which is crafted specifically for the OpenStack community. There seems to be value in hosting various metric types, mostly so comparisons can be made across platforms if they differ in any way. The consensus of the session was to first move forward with moving Stackalytics into our infrastructure, since so many projects find such value in it. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-activity-tracking

With this view from the work session room, it’s amazing we got anything done

Next up was QA: Testing Beyond the Gate. In OpenStack there is a test gate that all changes must pass in order for a change to be merged. In the past cycle periodic and post-merge tests have also been added, but it’s been found that if a code merging isn’t dependent upon these passing, not many people pay attention to these additional tests. The result of the session is a proposed dashboard for tracking these tests so that there’s an easier view into what they’re doing, whether they’re failing and so empower developers to fix them up. Tracking of third party testing in this, or a similar, tracker was also discussed as a proposal once the infra-run tests are being accounted for. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-testing-beyond-the-gate

The QA: DevStack Roadmap session covered some of the general cleanup that typically needs to be done in DevStack, but then also went into some of the broader action items, including improving the reliability of Centos tests run against it that are currently non-voting, pulling some things out of DevStack to support them as plugins as we move into a Big Tent world and work out how to move forward with Grenade. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-Devstack-Roadmap

I then attended QA: QA in the Big Tent. In the past cycle, OpenStack dropped the long process of being accepted into OpenStack as an official project and streamlined it so that competing technologies are now all in the mix, we’re calling it the Big Tent – as we’re now including everyone. This session focused on how to support the QA needs now that OpenStack is not just a slim core of a few projects. The general idea from a QA perspective is that they can continue to support the things-everyone-uses (nova, neutron, glance… an organically evolving list) and improve pluggable support for projects beyond that so they can help themselves to the QA tools at their disposal. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-in-the-big-tent

With sessions behind me, I boarded a bus for the Core Reviewer Party, hosted at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. As party venues go, this was a great one. The museum was open for us to explore, and they also offered tours. The main event took place outside, where they served design-your-own curry seafood dishes, bison, cheeses and salmon. Of course no OpenStack event would be complete with a few bars around serving various wines and beer. There was an adjacent small building where live music was playing and there was a lot of space to walk around, catch the sunset and enjoy some gardens. I spent much of my early evening with friends from Time Warner Cable, and rounded things off with several of my buddies from HP. This ended up being a get-back-after-midnight event for me, but it was totally worth it to spend such a great time with everyone.

Thursday morning kicked off with a series of fishbowl sessions where the Infrastructure team was discussing projects we have in the works. First up was Infrastructure: Zuul v3. Zuul is our pipeline-oriented project gating system, which currently works by facilitating the of running tests and automated tasks in response to Gerrit events. Right now it sends jobs off to Gearman for launching via Jenkins to our fleet of waiting nodes, but we’re really using Jenkins as a shim here, not really taking advantage of the built in features that Jenkins offers. We’re also in need of a system that better supports multi-tenancy and multi-node jobs and which can scale as OpenStack continues to grow, particularly with Big Tent. This session discussed the end game of phasing out Jenkins in favor of a more Zuul-driven workflow and more immediate changes that may be made to Nodepool and smaller projects like Zuul-merger to drive our vision. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-zuulv3

Everyone loves bug reporting and task tracking, right? In the next session, Infrastructure: Task tracking, that was our topic. We did an experiment with the creation of Storyboard as our homebrewed solution to bug and task tracking, but in spite of valiant efforts by the small team working on it, they were unable to gain more contributors and the job was simply too big for the size of the team doing the work. As a result, we’re now back to looking at solutions other than Canonical’s hosted Launchpad (which is currently used). The session went through some basic evaluation of a few tools, and at the end there was some consensus to work toward bringing up a more battle-hardened and Puppetized instance of Maniphest (from Phabricator) so that teams can see if it fits their needs. Etherpad here:YVR-infra-task-tracking

The morning continued with an Infrastructure: Infra-cloud session. The Infrastructure team has about 150 machines in a datacenter that have been donated to us by HP. The session focused on how we can put these to use as Nodepool instances by running OpenStack on our own and adding that “infra-cloud” to the providers in Nodepool. I’m particularly interested in this, given some of my history with getting TripleO into testing (so have deployed OpenStack many, many times!) and in general eager to learn even more about production OpenStack deployments. So it looks like I’ll be providing Infra-brains to Clint Byrum who is otherwise taking a lead here. To keep in sync with other things we host, we’ll be using Puppet to deploy OpenStack, so I’m thankful for the expertise of people like Colleen Murphy who just joined our team to help with that. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-cloud

Next up was the Infrastructure: Puppet testing session. It was great to have some of the OpenStack Puppet folks in the room so they could talk some about how they’re using beaker-rspec in our infra for testing the OpenStack modules themselves. Much of the discussion centered around whether we want to follow their lead, or do something else, leveraging our current system of node allocation to do our own module testing. We also have a much commented on spec up for proposal here. The result of the discussion was that it’s likely that we’ll just follow the lead of the OpenStack Puppet team. Etherpad here: kilo-infra-puppet-testing

That afternoon we had another Infrastructure: Work session where we focused on the refactor of portions of system-config OpenStack module puppet scripts, and some folks worked on getting the testing infrastructure that was talked about earlier. I took the opportunity to do some reviews of the related patches and help a new contributor do some review – she even submitted a patch that was merged the next morning! Etherpad for the work session here: YVR-infra-puppet-openstackci

The last session I attended that day was QA: Liberty Priorities. It wasn’t one I strictly needed to be in, but I hadn’t attended a session in room 306 yet, and it was the famous gosling room! The room had a glass wall that looked out onto a roof were a couple of geese had their babies and would routinely walk by and interrupt the session because everyone would stop, coo and take pictures of them. So I finally got to see the babies! The actual session collected the pile of to do list items generated at the summit, which I got roped into helping with, and prioritized them. Oh, and they gave me a task to help with. I just wanted to see the geese! Etherpad with the priorities is here: YVR-QA-Liberty-Priorities

Photo by Thierry Carrez (source)

Thursday night I ended up having dinner with the moderator of our women of OpenStack panel, Beth Cohen. We went down to Gastown to enjoy a dinner of oysters and seafood and had a wonderful time. It was great to swap tech (and women in tech) stories and chat about our work.

Friday! The OpenStack conference itself ended on Thursday, so it was just ATCs (Active Technical Contributors) attending for the final day of the Design Summit. So things were much quieter and the agenda was full of contributors meetups. I spent the day in the Infrastructure, QA and Release management contributors meetup. We had a long list of things to work on, but I focused on the election tooling, which I ended up following up with on list and then later had a chat with the author of the proposed tooling. My afternoon was spent working on the translations infrastructure with Steve Kowalik who works with me on OpenStack infra and Carlos Munoz of the Zanata team. We were able to work through the outstanding Zanata bugs and make some progress with how we’re going to tackle everything, it was a productive afternoon and always a pleasure to get together with the folks I work with online every day.

That evening, as we left the closing conference center, I met up with several colleagues for an amazing sushi dinner in downtown Vancouver. A perfect, low-key ending to an amazing event!

My second day of the OpenStack summit came early with he Women of OpenStack working breakfast at 7AM. It kicked off with a series of lightning talks that talked about impostor syndrome, growing as a technical leader (get yourself out there, ask questions) and suggestions from a tech start-up founder about being an entrepreneur. From there we broke up into groups to discuss what we’d like to see from the Women of OpenStack group in the next year. The big take-aways were around mentoring of new women joining our community and starting to get involved with all the OpenStack tooling and more generally giving voice to the women in our community.

Keynotes kicked off at 9AM with Mark Collier announcing the next OpenStack Summit venues: Austin for the spring 2016 summit and Barcelona for the fall 2016 summit. He then went into a series of chats and demos related to using containers, which may be the Next Big Thing in cloud computing. During the session we heard from a few companies who are already using OpenStack with containers (mostly Docker and Kubernetes) in production (video). The keynotes continued with one by Intel, where the speaker took time to talk about how valuable feedback from operators has been in the past year, and appreciation for the new diversity working group (video). The keynote from EBay/Paypal showed off the really amazing progress they’ve made with deploying OpenStack, with it now running on over 300k cores and pretty much powers Paypal at this point (video). Red Hat’s keynote focused on customer engagement as OpenStack matures (video). The keynotes wrapped up with one from NASA JPL, which mostly talked about the awesome Mars projects they’re working on and the massive data requirements therein (video).

OpenStack at EBay/Paypal

Following keynotes, Tuesday really kicked off the core OpenStack Design Summit sessions, where I focused on a series of Cross Project Workshops. First up was Moving our applications to Python 3. This session focused on the migration of Python 3 for functional and integration testing in OpenStack projects now that Oslo libraries are working in Python 3. The session mostly centered around strategy, how to incrementally move projects over and the requirements for the move (2.x dependencies, changes to Ubuntu required to effectively use Python 3.4 for gating, etc). Etherpad here: liberty-cross-project-python3. I then attended Functional Testing Show & Tell which was a great session where projects shared their stories about how they do functional (and some unit) testing in their projects. The Etherpad for this one is super valuable for seeing what everyone reports, it’s available here: liberty-functional-testing-show-tell.

My Design Summit sessions were broken up nicely with a lunch with my fellow panelists, and then the Standing Tall in the Room – Sponsored by the Women of OpenStack panel itself at 2PM (video). It was wonderful to finally meet my fellow panelists in person and the session itself was well-attended and we got a lot of positive feedback from it. I tackled a question about shyness with regard to giving presentations here at the OpenStack Summit, where I pointed at a webinar about submitting a proposal via the Women of OpenStack published in January. I also talked about difficulties related to the first time you write to the development mailing list, participate on IRC and submit code for review. I used an example of having to submit 28 patches for one of my early patches, and audience member Steve Martinelli helpfully tweeted about a 63 patch change. Diving in to all these things helps, as does supporting the ideas of and doing code review for others in your community. Of course my fellow panelists had great things to say too, watch the video!

Thanks to Lisa-Marie Namphy for the photo!

Panel selfie by Rainya Mosher

Following the panel, it was back to the Design Summit. The In-team scaling session was an interesting one with regard to metrics. We’ve learned that regardless of project size, socially within OpenStack it seems difficult for any projects to rise above 14 core reviewers, and keep enough common culture, focus and quality. The solutions presented during the session tended to be heavy on technology (changes to ACLs, splitting up the repo to trusted sub-groups). It’ll be interesting to see how the scaling actually pans out, as there seem to be many more social and leadership solutions to the problem of patches piling up and not having enough core folks to review them. There was also some discussion about the specs process, but the problems and solutions seem to heavily vary between teams, so it seemed unlikely that a unified solution to unprocessed specs would be universal, but it does seem like the process is often valuable for certain things. Etherpad here: liberty-cross-project-in-team-scaling.

My last session of the day was OpenStack release model(s). A time-based discussion required broader participation, so much of the discussion centered around the ability for projects to independently do intermediary releases outside of the release cycle and how that could be supported, but I think the jury is still out on a solution there. There was also talk about how to generally handle release tracking, as it’s difficult to predict what will land, so much so that people have stopped relying on the predictions and that bled into a discussion about release content reporting (release changelogs). In all, an interesting session with some good ideas about how to move forward, Etherpad here: liberty-cross-project-release-models.

I spent the evening with friends and colleagues at the HP+Scality hosted party at Rocky Mountaineer Station. BBQ, food trucks and getting to see non-Americans/non-Canadians try s’mores for the first time, all kinds of fun! Fortunately I managed to make it back to my hotel at a reasonable hour.

This week I’m at the OpenStack Summit. It’s the most wonderful, exhausting and valuable-to-my-job event I go to, and it happens twice a year. This time it’s being held in the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC, and the conference venue is right on the water, so we get to enjoy astonishing views throughout the day.

OpenStack Summit: Clouds inside and outside!

Jonathan Bryce Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation kicked off the event with an introduction to the summit, success that OpenStack has built in the Process, Store and Move digital economy, and some announcements, among which was the success found with federated identity support in Keystone where Morgan Fainberg, PTL of Keystone, helped show off a demonstration. The first company keynote was presented by Digitalfilm Tree who did a really fun live demo of shooting video at the summit here in Vancouver, using their OpenStack-powered cloud so it was accessible in Los Angeles for editorial review and then retrieving and playing the resulting video. They shared that a recent show that was shot in Vancouver used this very process for the daily editing and that they had previously used courier services and staff-hopping-on-planes to do the physical moving of digital content because it was too much for their previous systems. Finally, Comcast employees rolled onto the stage on a couch to chat about how they’ve expanded their use of OpenStack since presenting at the summit in Portland, Oregon Video of the all of this available here.

Next up for keynotes was Walmart, who talked about how they moved to OpenStack and used it for all the load on their sites experienced over the 2014 holiday season and how OpenStack has met their needs, video here. Then came HP’s keynote, which really focused on the community and choices available aspect of OpenStack, where speaker Mark Interrante said “OpenStack should be simpler, you shouldn’t need a PhD to run it.” Bravo! He also pointed out that HP’s booth had a demonstration of OpenStack running on various hardware at the booth, an impressively inclusive step for a company that also sells hardware. Video for HP’s keynote here (I dig the Star Wars reference). Keynotes continued with one from TD Bank, which I became familiar with when they bought up the Commerce branches in the Philadelphia region, but have since learned are a major Canadian Bank (oooh, TD stands for Toronto Dominion!). The most fascinating thing about their moved to the cloud for me is how they’ve imposed a cloud-first policy across their infrastructure, where teams must have a really good reason and approval in order to do more traditional bare-metal, one off deployments for their applications, so it’s rare, video. Cybera was the next keynote and perhaps the most inspiring from a humanitarian standpoint. As one of the earliest OpenStack adopters, Cybera is a non-profit that seeks to improve access to the internet and valuable resources therein, which presented Robin Winsor stressed in his keynote was now as the physical infrastructure that was built in North America in the 19th and 20th centuries (railroads, highways, etc), video here. The final keynote was from Solidfire who discussed the importance of solid storage as a basis of a successful deployment, video here.

Following the keynotes, I headed over to the Virtual Networking in OpenStack: Neutron 101 (video) where Kyle Mestery and Mark McClain gave a great overview of how Neutron works with various diagrams showing of the agents and improvements made in Kilo with various new drivers and plugins. The video is well worth the watch.

A chunk of my day was then reserved for translations. My role here is as the Infrastructure team contact for the translations tooling, so it’s also been a crash course in learning about translations workflows since I only speak English. Each session, even unrelated to the actual infrastructure-focused tooling has been valuable to learning. In the first translation team working session the focus was translations glossaries, which are used to help give context/meaning to certain English words where the meaning can be unclear or otherwise needs to be defined in terms of the project. There was representation from the Documentation team, which was valuable as they maintain a docs-focused glossary (here) which is more maintained and has a bigger team than the proposed separate translations glossary would have. Interesting discussion, particularly as my knowledge of translations glossaries was limited. Etherpad here: Vancouver-I18n-WG-session.

I hosted the afternoon session on Building Translation Platform. We’re migrating the team to Zanata have been fortunate to have Carlos Munoz, one of the developers on Zanata, join us at every summit since Atlanta. They’ve been one of the most supportive upstreams I’ve ever worked with, prioritizing our bug reports and really working with us to make sure our adoption is a success. The session itself reviewed the progress of our migration and set some deadlines for having translators begin the testing/feedback cycle. We also talked about hosting a Horizon instance in infra, refreshed daily, so that translators can actually see where translations are most needed via the UI and can prioritize appropriately. Finally, it was a great opportunity to get feedback from translators about what they need from the new workflow and have Carlos there to answer questions and help prioritize bugs. Etherpad here: Vancouver-I18n-Translation-platform-session.

My last translations-related thing of the day was Here be dragons – Translating OpenStack (slides). This was a great talk by Łukasz JernaÅ› that began with some benefits of translations work and then went into best practices and tips for working with open source translations and OpenStack specifically. It was another valuable session for me as the tooling contact because it gave me insight into some of the pain points and how appropriate it would be to address these with tooling vs. social changes to translations workflows.

From there I went back to general talks, attending Building Clouds with OpenStack Puppet Modules by Emilien Macchi, Mike Dorman and Matt Fischer (video). The OpenStack Infrastructure team is looking at building our own infra-cloud (we have a session on it later this week) and the workflows and tips that this presentation gave would also be helpful to me in other work I’ve been focusing on.

The final session I wandered into was a series of Lightning Talks, put together by HP. They had a great lineup of speakers from various companies and organizations. My evening was then spent at an HP employee gathering, but given my energy level and planned attendance at the Women of OpenStack breakfast at 7AM the following morning I headed back to my hotel around 9PM.