On 04/11/2016 09:43 AM, Allison Randal wrote:

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Davanum Srinivas <davanum@gmail.com> wrote:

Reading unofficial notes [1], i found one topic very interesting:
One Platform – How do we truly support containers and bare metal under
a common API with VMs? (Ironic, Nova, adjacent communities e.g.
Kubernetes, Apache Mesos etc)

Anyone present at the meeting, please expand on those few notes on
etherpad? And how if any this feedback is getting back to the
projects?

It was really two separate conversations that got conflated in the
summary. One conversation was just being supportive of bare metal, VMs,
and containers within the OpenStack umbrella. The other conversation
started with Monty talking about his work on shade, and how it wouldn't
exist if more APIs were focused on the way users consume the APIs, and
less an expression of the implementation details of each project.
OpenStackClient was mentioned as a unified CLI for OpenStack focused
more on the way users consume the CLI. (OpenStackSDK wasn't mentioned,
but falls in the same general category of work.)

i.e. There wasn't anything new in the conversation, it was more a matter
of the developers/TC members on the board sharing information about work
that's already happening.

I agree with that - but would like to clarify the 'bare metal, VMs and containers' part a bit. (an in fact, I was concerned in the meeting that the messaging around this would be confusing because we 'supporting bare metal' and 'supporting containers' mean two different things but we use one phrase to talk about it.

It's abundantly clear at the strategic level that having OpenStack be able to provide both VMs and Bare Metal as two different sorts of resources (ostensibly but not prescriptively via nova) is one of our advantages. We wanted to underscore how important it is to be able to do that, and wanted to underscore that so that it's really clear how important it is any time the "but cloud should just be VMs" sentiment arises.

The way we discussed "supporting containers" was quite different and was not about nova providing containers. Rather, it was about reaching out to our friends in other communities and working with them on making OpenStack the best place to run things like kubernetes or docker swarm. Those are systems that ultimately need to run, and it seems that good integration (like kuryr with libnetwork) can provide a really strong story. I think pretty much everyone agrees that there is not much value to us or the world for us to compete with kubernetes or docker.

So, we do want to be supportive of bare metal and containers - but the specific _WAY_ we want to be supportive of those things is different for each one.