Anatomy of an OpenStack distribution

Last week I went to an internal developer event of a Red Hat customer, and presented RDO, our workflow and tools for continuous packaging with my colleague Alfredo Moralejo. This presentation came from an proposal dmsimard and I had for the Barcelona OpenStack Summit, but did not get accepted, so hey, at least it got somewhere.

The audience was quite technical, and they seemed to be happy with the content, since the Q&A session went on for about 25 minutes  :).

Interested in the seeing the slides? You can check them online.

Advertisement

Getting cross-project changes in OpenStack to our user’s hands

When working with an OpenStack installer, it is quite common to see changes happening in upstream projects break it. Options get deprecated every other day, new options show up, projects add dependencies… After all, this is one of the main reasons for RDO to have a continuous packaging pipeline coupled with CI jobs testing the latest commits.

However, in some cases we see some cross-project changes landing, and that takes quite a lot of coordination to happen, specially once we get passed the “it worked with DevStack!” point. As an example, I will discuss the switch from the MySQL-Python library to PyMySQL that happened during the Liberty cycle. We will follow the process from the initial decision until it got implemented in all projects (and DevStack), and then what it took us to get that change propagated into RDO and in the hands of our users.