Quo Vadimus

Where are we going?

This is a document in Devstack to outline where we are headed in the future. The future might be near or far, but this is where we'd like to be.

This is intended to help people contribute, because it will be a little clearer if a contribution takes us closer to or further away to our end game.

Default Services

Devstack is designed as a development environment first. There are a lot of ways to compose the OpenStack services, but we do need one default.

That should be the Compute Layer (currently Glance + Nova + Cinder + Neutron Core (not advanced services) + Keystone). It should be the base building block going forward, and the introduction point of people to OpenStack via Devstack.

Service Howtos

Starting from the base building block all services included in OpenStack should have an overview page in the Devstack documentation. That should include the following:

• A helpful high level overview of that service
• What it depends on (both other OpenStack services and other system components)
• What new daemons are needed to be started, including where they should live

This provides a map for people doing multinode testing to understand what portions are control plane, which should live on worker nodes.

Service how to pages will start with an ugly "This team has provided no information about this service" until someone does.

Included Services

Devstack doesn't need to eat the world. Given the existence of the external devstack plugin architecture, the future direction is to move the bulk of the support code out of devstack itself and into external plugins.

This will also promote a more clean separation between services.

Included Backends / Drivers

Upstream Devstack should only include Open Source backends / drivers, it's intent is for Open Source development of OpenStack. Proprietary drivers should be supported via external plugins.

Just being Open Source doesn't mean it should be in upstream Devstack if it's not required for base development of OpenStack components. When in doubt, external plugins should be used.

OpenStack Services vs. System Services

ENABLED_SERVICES is currently entirely too overloaded. We should have a separation of actual OpenStack services that you have to run (n-cpu, g-api) and required backends like mysql and rabbitmq.

Splitting up of Functions

The functions-common file has grown over time, and needs to be split up into smaller libraries that handle specific domains.

Testing of Functions

Every function in a functions file should get tests. The devstack testing framework is young, but we do have some unit tests for the tree, and those should be enhanced.

Not Co-Gating with the World

As projects spin up functional test jobs, Devstack should not be co-gated with every single one of those. The Devstack team has one of the fastest turn arounds for blocking bugs of any Open Stack project.

Basic service validation should be included as part of Devstack installation to mitigate this.

Documenting all the things

Devstack started off as an explanation as much as an install script. We would love contributions to that further enhance the comments and explanations about what is happening, even if it seems a little pedantic at times.