On Sep 24, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Zane Bitter <zbit...@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 18/09/14 14:53, Monty Taylor wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> I've recently been thinking a lot about Sean's Layers stuff. So I wrote
>> a blog post which Jim Blair and Devananda were kind enough to help me edit.
>> 
>> http://inaugust.com/post/108
> 
> I think there are a number of unjustified assumptions behind this arrangement 
> of things. I'm going to list some here, but I don't want anyone to interpret 
> this as a personal criticism of Monty. The point is that we all suffer from 
> biases - not for any questionable reasons but purely as a result of our own 
> experiences, who we spend our time talking to and what we spend our time 
> thinking about - and therefore we should all be extremely circumspect about 
> trying to bake our own mental models of what OpenStack should be into the 
> organisational structure of the project itself.

I think there were some assumptions that lead to the Layer1 model. Perhaps a 
little insight into the in-person debate[1] at OpenStack-SV might help explain 
where monty was coming from.

The initial thought was a radical idea (pioneered by Jay) to completely 
dismantle the integrated release and have all projects release independently 
and functionally test against their real dependencies. This gained support from 
various people and I still think it is a great long-term goal.

The worry that Monty (and others) had are two-fold:

1. When we had no co-gating in the past, we ended up with a lot of 
cross-project breakage. If we jump right into this we could end up in the wild 
west were different projects expect different keystone versions and there is no 
way to deploy a functional cloud.
2. We have set expectations in our community (and especially with 
distributions), that we release a set of things that all work together. It is 
not acceptable for us to just pull the rug out from under them.

These concerns show that we must (in the short term) provide some kind of 
integrated testing and release. I see the layer1 model as a stepping stone 
towards the long term goal of having the projects release independently and 
depend on stable interfaces. We aren’t going to get there immediately, so 
having a smaller, integrated set of services representing our most common use 
case seems like a good first step. As our interfaces get more stable and our 
testing gets better it could move to a (once every X months) release that just 
packages the current version of the layer1 projects or even be completely 
managed by distributions.

We need a way to move forward, but I’m hoping we can do it without a concept of 
“specialness” around layer1 projects. I actually see it as a limitation of 
these projects that we have to take this stepping stone and cannot disaggregate 
completely. Instead it should be seen as a necessary evil so that we don’t 
break our users.

In addition, we should encourage other shared use cases in openstack both for 
testing (functional tests against groups of services) and for releases (shared 
releases of related projects).

[1] Note this wasn’t a planned debate, but a spontaneous discussion that 
included (at various points) Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Joe Gordon, John 
Dickenson, Myself, and (undoubtedly) one or two people I”m forgetting.

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