+1 markmc To get close to total interop (which I think is the goal, or ideal at least) you have to start where you are (bootstrap). If we were to, at this moment, define OpenStack as something no current cloud would qualify for, that wouldn't be very practical. I think we can bootstrap while encouraging the trend to move towards the ideal over time. I also think just having the information (the good, the bad, and the ugly) about what current clouds (and distributions used to build them) support will improve market efficiency. Regardless of where any lines might be drawn about what the results mean. Users/customers can and will draw their own conclusions. On Feb 5, 2014 6:14 AM, Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 13:04 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Mark McLoughlin wrote:
To put the question another way - which helps users more? The ability to write interoperable code which uses a large number of OpenStack APIs, but which is only actually interoperable between a small number of OpenStack clouds? Or interoperability whereby you have a smaller set of interoperable APIs, but code that uses only those APIs would be interoperable with a much larger number of OpenStack clouds?
I like your way of framing the question.
Personally I think going for loose interoperability is short-sighted. Yes you'll have a lot of providers but you'll forever have a bad experience moving workloads around.
With total interoperability, you may have less providers at start, but at least they provide a great experience moving workloads around. And as more join them, it only gets better. Total interoperability is basically the only way to potentially reach one day the nirvana of "lots of providers + great end user experience".
The trick is to bootstrap it. If you have 0 or 1 "true openstack" cloud available at first, it's hard to get any benefit from that hypothetical federation. Total interop requires a bit of a leap of faith.
Right, it's about bootstrapping - I'm all for total interoperability, but feel it will need to be "looser than total" in order to bootstrap it.
So yet another way to frame that discussion (at board level) is: are you more interested in convergence and federation (and beating Amazon all together), or are you more interested in competing (and be a set of individual loosely-coupled small competitors to Amazon).
I'd hope there would be consensus around convergence and, if so, I'd like to see a discussion about bootstrapping tactics.
Mark.
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