There are a few reasons, but the primary one that affects me is Its from the
app-catalog use case.
To gain user support for a product like OpenStack, you need users. The easier you make it
to use, the more users you can potentially get. Traditional Operating Systems learned
this a while back. Rather then make each OS user have to be a developer and custom deploy
every app they want to run, they split the effort in such a way that Developers can
provide software through channels that Users that are not skilled Developers can consume
and deploy. The "App" culture in the mobile space it the epitome of that at the
moment. My grandmother fires up the app store on her phone, clicks install on something
interesting, and starts using it.
Right now, Thats incredibly difficult in OpenStack. You have to find the
software your interested in, figure out which components your going to consume
(nova, magnum, which COE, etc) then use those api's to launch some resource.
Then after that resource is up, then you have to switch tools and then use
those tools to further launch things, ansible or kubectl or whatever, then
further deploy things.
What I'm looking for, is a unified enough api, that a user can go into horizon,
go to the app catalog, find an interesting app, click install/run, and then get
a link to a service they can click on and start consuming the app they want in
the first place. The number of users that could use such an interface, and
consume OpenStack resources are several orders of magnitude greater then the
numbers that can manually deploy something ala the procedure in the previous
paragraph. More of that is good for Users, Developers, and Operators.
Does that help?
Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Keith Bray [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2016 1:10 PM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [magnum][app-catalog][all] Build unified
abstraction for all COEs
If you don¹t want a user to have to choose a COE, can¹t we just offer an
option for the operator to mark a particular COE as the ³Default COE² that
could be defaulted to if one isn¹t specified in the Bay create call? If
the operator didn¹t specify a default one, then the CLI/UI must submit one
in the bay create call otherwise it would fail.
Kevin, can you clarify Why you have to write scripts to deploy a container
to the COE? It can be made easy for the user to extract all the
runtime/env vars needed for a user to just do ³docker run Š² and poof,
container running on Swarm on a Magnum bay. Can you help me understand
the script part of it? I don¹t believe container users want an
abstraction between them and their COE CLIŠ but, what I believe isn¹t
important. What I do think is important is that we not require OpenStack
operators to run that abstraction layer to be running a ³magnum compliant²
service. It should either be an ³optional² API add-on or a separate API
or separate project. If some folks want an abstraction layer, then great,
feel free to build it and even propose it under the OpenStack ecosystem..
But, that abstraction would be a ³proxy API" over the COEs, and doesn¹t
need to be part of Magnum¹s offering, as it would be targeted at the COE
interactions and not the bay interactions (which is where Magnum scope is
best focused). I don¹t think Magnum should play in both these distinct
domains (Bay interaction vs. COE interaction). The former (bay
interaction) is an infrastructure cloud thing (fits well with OpenStack),
the latter (COE interaction) is an obfuscation of emerging technologies,
which gets in to the Trap that Adrian mentioned. The abstraction layer
API will forever and always be drastically behind in trying to keep up
with the COE innovation.
In summary, an abstraction over the COEs would be best served as a
different effort. Magnum would be best focused on bay interactions and
should not try to pick a COE winner or require an operator to run a
lowest-common-demonitor API abstraction.
Thanks for listening to my soap-box.
-Keith
On 4/21/16, 2:36 PM, "Fox, Kevin M" <[email protected]> wrote:
I agree with that, and thats why providing some bare minimum abstraction
will help the users not have to choose a COE themselves. If we can't
decide, why can they? If all they want to do is launch a container, they
should be able to script up "magnum launch-container foo/bar:latest" and
get one. That script can then be relied upon.
Today, they have to write scripts to deploy to the specific COE they have
chosen. If they chose Docker, and something better comes out, they have
to go rewrite a bunch of stuff to target the new, better thing. This puts
a lot of work on others.
Do I think we can provide an abstraction that prevents them from ever
having to rewrite scripts? No. There are a lot of features in the COE
world in flight right now and we dont want to solidify an api around them
yet. We shouldn't even try that. But can we cover a few common things
now? Yeah.
Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Adrian Otto [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2016 7:32 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [magnum][app-catalog][all] Build unified
abstraction for all COEs
On Apr 20, 2016, at 2:49 PM, Joshua Harlow <[email protected]>
wrote:
Thierry Carrez wrote:
Adrian Otto wrote:
This pursuit is a trap. Magnum should focus on making native container
APIs available. We should not wrap APIs with leaky abstractions. The
lowest common denominator of all COEs is an remarkably low value API
that adds considerable complexity to Magnum that will not
strategically advance OpenStack. If we instead focus our effort on
making the COEs work better on OpenStack, that would be a winning
strategy. Support and compliment our various COE ecosystems.
So I'm all for avoiding 'wrap APIs with leaky abstractions' and 'making
COEs work better on OpenStack' but I do dislike the part about COEs
(plural) because it is once again the old non-opinionated problem that
we (as a community) suffer from.
Just my 2 cents, but I'd almost rather we pick one COE and integrate
that deeply/tightly with openstack, and yes if this causes some part of
the openstack community to be annoyed, meh, to bad. Sadly I have a
feeling we are hurting ourselves by continuing to try to be everything
and not picking anything (it's a general thing we, as a group, seem to
be good at, lol). I mean I get the reason to just support all the
things, but it feels like we as a community could just pick something,
work together on figuring out how to pick one, using all these bright
leaders we have to help make that possible (and yes this might piss some
people off, to bad). Then work toward making that something great and
move onŠ
The key issue preventing the selection of only one COE is that this area
is moving very quickly. If we would have decided what to pick at the time
the Magnum idea was created, we would have selected Docker. If you look
at it today, you might pick something else. A few months down the road,
there may be yet another choice that is more compelling. The fact that a
cloud operator can integrate services with OpenStack, and have the
freedom to offer support for a selection of COE¹s is a form of insurance
against the risk of picking the wrong one. Our compute service offers a
choice of hypervisors, our block storage service offers a choice of
storage hardware drivers, our networking service allows a choice of
network drivers. Magnum is following the same pattern of choice that has
made OpenStack compelling for a very diverse community. That design
consideration was intentional.
Over time, we can focus the majority of our effort on deep integration
with COEs that users select the most. I¹m convinced it¹s still too early
to bet the farm on just one choice.
Adrian
I'm with Adrian on that one. I've attended a lot of container-oriented
conferences over the past year and my main takeaway is that this new
crowd of potential users is not interested (at all) in an
OpenStack-specific lowest common denominator API for COEs. They want to
take advantage of the cool features in Kubernetes API or the
versatility
of Mesos. They want to avoid caring about the infrastructure provider
bit (and not deploy Mesos or Kubernetes themselves).
Let's focus on the infrastructure provider bit -- that is what we do
and
what the ecosystem wants us to provide.
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