All,
I just wanted to try to write up a summary of what occurred during the
Ganglia Developer's Meeting at the Groundwork Open Source offices in San
Francisco. If I miss anything or get anything wrong, please feel free to
correct it. The following is a list of those that were in attendance:
Matt Massie, Bernard Li, Carlo Arenas, Brad Nicholes, Jesse Becker, Peter Mui,
Yemi Adesanya, John Allspaw, Martin Knoblauch, Chuck Simmons
-----
We spent the first part of Thurs. talking about the Ganglia source code and
various ideas on how it could be enhanced. Kind of a brainstorming session. A
few of the ideas that came out of that brainstorming session were things like:
- Sending only diffs in the XML that is produced from Gmond rather than dumping
the entire set of data for all nodes in the cluster. This would allow Gmetad
to parse and update the relevant data rather than having to weed through
unchanged metric data.
- Rewrite Gmetad in python so that it is more portable and also able to take
advantage of common python libraries for things like network, xml parsing,
hashing, etc.
- Testing compatibility between 3.1.x and 3.0.x.
- A metric module repository that would used to host third party authored
metric modules that have been contributed to the Ganglia project but are not
included in the standard Ganglia distribution
-----
Thurs. afternoon was spent discussing the wish list and release road map for
the upcoming Ganglia 3.1.x release. The decisions made in this area were that
we still had three outstanding issues that needed to be taken care of before
creating the Ganglia 3.1.x stable branch in the SVN repository. These three
issues are:
- Collect and send all memory metrics as floats rather than ints. This should
clear up the 4T issue.
- Remove expat and APR source code from the Ganglia SVN repository since they
are both already common libraries in most/all distros or could be easily
downloaded and installed either through a source tarball or RPM. Libconfuse
will remain in the SVN repository for now.
- Rewrite the XML for the EXTRA_DATA tag to use sub-tags rather than
attributes. This allows the extra data that is sent from a gmond node to be
much more flexible (ie. the ability for an individual nodes to communicate
presentation level metadata to the frontend as well as other types of metadata).
Once these three issues have been completed, a snap shot of TRUNK will be
used to create a 3.1.x stable branch in the repository. At that point the
3.1.x branch will be subject to the Review-Then-Commit rules (to be documented
soon on the Ganglia project wiki). All effort will be to test and stabilize
the branch so that we can create our first release of 3.1.x. TRUNK will remain
the development/unstable branch.
It was determined that all other wish list items could be completed in later
minor revision releases. Some of the most significant items revolved around
enhancing or rewriting the web frontend (stacked graphs, custom graphs,
persistent grouping, etc.). See the wish list for more details.
-----
We spent Friday morning and part of the afternoon talking about the
administration of the Ganglia project itself. Some of the decisions that were
made in this area included:
- Version scheme for all official releases and development snapshots. All
official releases will be marked with a tri-level versioning (ie. 3.1.x). The
first official release candidate will be marked as 3.1.1 with the micro number
increasing as additional release candidates are produced. An official release
will not be reversioned from the version number of the release candidate that
it is associated with. In other words, if release candidate 3.1.2 is tested
and accepted as an official release, the version of the official release will
be 3.1.2. All development snapshots will be marked with a quad-level
versioning (ie. 3.1.x.xxxx) with the micro number indicating the official
release that it is derived from and the nano number indicating the SVN revision
number of the snapshot.
- A security email list will be set up for reporting any security related
issues with the software. All Ganglia users and developers will be allowed to
send security related issues to this list, but only designated security team
members will be allowed to subscribe to the list. This will allow the Ganglia
project to address and resolved security related issues without having to
divulge the details of a potential vulnerability before a patch has been
produced. (more on the gangia wiki page soon)
- An admin email list will be set up for use by the Ganglia project
administrators. This list will be a private mailing list that is only
available to the project administrators. The purpose for this list will be to
allow the project administrators to discuss administrative issues in private
(such as extending commit rights to individual contributors, etc.) before
announcing the decisions to the public. The list will NOT be used to discuss
technical issues.
- All documentation and project release information will be moved to the
Ganglia wiki page. (More on this soon)
- All enhancements and patches to a released version of the software, must
first be commited to the TRUNK area of the SVN repository and then proposed for
backport. This will ensure that no patches are lost as the code moves forward.
-----
Friday afternoon was spent talking with Tara Spalding of Groundworks and Joe
Panettieri (thevarguy.com) about the Ganglia project and it's significance in
the commercial world. We also spent time talking with John Allspaw of Yahoo
and discussing many of the usage experiences that they have had. Some
additional brainstorming on things that could be done both in the web frontend
and the backend to make Ganglia a better monitoring product. We finished up by
being treated to dinner by Peter Mui and the Groundworks Open Source.
I would just like to thank all of those that participated in the Ganglia
Developer's Meeting and especially to Groundworks Open Source for sponsoring
and hosting the event at their facilities. I personally think that this
meeting was a great success and I think that the Ganglia community has a lot to
look forward to as a result.
thanks again to all,
Brad
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