Continuing my thoughts and experience writing about the OpenStack PTG in Dublin, Ireland. Part 1 can be read at OpenStack Dublin PTG – Feb 2018 – Thoughts on First Two Days.
Wednesday through Friday were set aside as focused team work days. As part of the Monasca team (wiki), we really only had enough agenda for two days, and knowing that many of the attendees (including me) had planned to only stay through Thursday. They were two good days of discussion and planning, shortened slightly by the weather (see the next blog post for more on that.
Wednesday and Thursday Monasca Meetings
In long meetings, I often find I need something to help me focus, and taking notes also helps me remember, so I volunteered to update the Etherpad. See https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/monasca-ptg-rocky Other projects can be found at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/PTG/Rocky/Etherpads
We did manage to get some good planning and coordination done on the day and a half of focus we had. As most of us were meeting for the first time, it was great to connect with developers from Op5, Fujitsu and others (I already knew the SUSE guys, being one of them). We even had some participation from HPE over GoToMeeting.
OpenStack in general is kind of an odd beast. There are many companies working together at the same time they are competing with each other. Developers want to devote time to upstream work, but reality of corporate needs pulls them to work on their own distributions. The OpenStack community is also seeing a big shift as corporations that made a large contribution over the past years are now reevaluating and pulling back as they feel the need to see a return on those investments. This was addressed in one of the lunch topics by ttx, and I could probably write a separate rant about these currents.
One of those pullbacks has been HPE from Monasca. HP (before the E) was a major contributor and user of Monasca from the start. But with the corporate split and various shifts (including my team to SUSE), HPE is now working with a much smaller cloud team and so their priorities have shifted. Unfortunately they haven’t wanted to give up some of the lead roles even though the contributions are less.
I think meeting in person was very valuable for this team. Dinner Wednesday night (at Boxty House in the Temple Bar district) was a great chance to bond with a very international group. I hope I didn’t say anything too dumb (probably helps a lot that I don’t drink).
In our meeting on Thursday we did even make progress on one of the topics I’ve been associated with. Monasca Transform was developed at HP using Apache Spark (I work with one of the principle engineers), but later some HPE users felt it was too heavy, and not wanting to deal with the OpenStack overhead (I have another rant about that) they went and created Monasca Aggregator using Go outside the OpenStack tent. We had a good discussion about which is a better fit with our PTL, and I think we came to the conclusion that Mon Trans is much more complete but needs some improvements to documentation and usability. I’ve started in on some of that, though there is more to do.
Thursday afternoon and Friday
All week, we had been hearing dire warnings about the weather. On Thursday there was an announcement that the venue (Croke Park stadium) would be closing at 2pm and would not be open on Friday. So we hurried through the rest of the Monasca agenda and ended. If I’d been more motivated, I would have taken that extra day to do some work, but the motivation and focus had been lost in the confusion about how to get home.
Being in the same room with other engineers who are interested in a project is really a good experience. There are still some parts of the various OpenStack projects that I don’t fully grok, but when you get to interact with people from other companies you get to know some of their needs and motivations, and that knowledge can be really useful in making a project better.
Look for another post about what a mess the weather created with everyone’s travel arrangements.