Thank you Simon for the re-cap of the hackathon. I was able to catch the last couple of hours of it but saw the notes on the boards..
I am going to give my thoughts on this coming from a slightly different angle. As many of you know, I am not a coder. I am an Systems/Network Engineer. I know many times design decisions are made based upon the amount of time it will require to write a particular piece of code, update, fix bugs, etc. But the one thing we can't forget is that many ACS users may not have the ability to add their own plugins, write code to interact with a router, etc. I know I can't myself, going back to the I'm not a coder, but thankfully I know people that can and can get it done if need be but the point is many people cannot. As we decide how we are going to re-write the networking portions of ACS we have to step back and take a look at what was one of the most talked about topics at this year's CCC. I am not talking about the networking, IPV6 support or any other cool idea we had. The constant conversation in the hallways and at the many "Zest" outings was ADOPTION and MARKET AWARENESS. Adoption.. How do we get the word out and get it adopted by more people? It’s a tough question but something that also has to influence how we build ACS. Let take a moment and compare ACS to its closest competitor Openstack. We all know that Openstack has the market share, it has the money behind it. But what is the constant complaint we hear from people who use? ""Yea, it works but man,, it was a bi%#h to get going"" Openstack has gotten its adoption cause it had big names and a lot of money behind it. Openstacks complexity has also caused it to not be adopted in many cases. Your typical IT shop in a small to medium sized business does not have the expertise to implement something like this. And when I say SMB I am saying organizations from 10-500 people. So back to my adoption question. As mentioned before one of the reasons many people come to ACS is the fact that it has it all. Networking, hyper-visor management, user management, storage management, its multi-tenant. What will drive ACS adoption will be improving what ACS already does, not making it more like OpenStack. Now do I think that having a module service or plugin service to provide a framework to allow for external resources to be used by ACS is a good thing? Yes I do. But I also do not want to, and hope we don’t, move away from what made ACS what it is today. A software that allows companies to easily spin up new public or private clouds. Adoption-Centric Usability. If I rambled a little here I apologize, its 11:30pm and sometimes I get ahead of myself (especially when I write something like this at this hour) when writing about something I am passionate about and I am passionate about getting more exposure and adoption of ACS. Thank you for listening guys.. Sorry for the ramble. Regards, Marty Godsey Principal Engineer nSource Solutions, LLC -----Original Message----- From: Rafael Weingärtner [mailto:rafaelweingart...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 11:18 AM To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org Subject: Re: Miami CCC '17 Roundtable/Hackathon Summary I missed the roundtable and hackathon, my bad guys :( I liked the ideas that you (all) put forward. The VR is interesting and a nice feature to have, but it causes some pain to maintain in our development cycles. The idea to split the current VR into NFV is great; this can make things more pluggable and take ACS to NFV (officially). We could develop a framework in ACS (an API method?) that creates a system VM called NFV where people (vendors, enthusiast, users and others) can then extend and add their functions/systems there. The problem is the work required to design and develop such thing. I use Daan`s words here, this is a community effort and not a single company or individual. What do you guys think? We could start creating a roadmap of when we want this feature (milestones for delivering piece by piece of the complete feature), then the draft of a proposal, and later define the implementation job, so people of the community can embrace it. On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 10:18 AM, Daan Hoogland <daan.hoogl...@shapeblue.com > wrote: > Great thanks Simon, > > Just want to play bingo a bit; dividing the VR into VNFs (virtual > network > functions) was mentioned. This pertains to the mention of making the > VR more modular ;) > > Hopefully everybody is inspired by this because no one company or > person is going to make this happen. > > Dahn > > On 23/05/17 14:16, "Simon Weller" <swel...@ena.com.INVALID> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > During the CCC last week in Miami, we held a roundtable/hackathon > to discuss some of the major areas the community would like to focus > more attention. > > > The discussions were passionate and were mainly focused around > networking and our current use of our home-spun Virtual Router. > > > For most of the us, the VR has become a challenging beast, mainly > due to how difficult it is to end-to-end test for new releases. > > Quite often PRs are pushed that fix an issue on one feature set, > but break another unintentionally. This has a great deal to do with > how inter-mingled all the features are currently. > > > We floated some ideas related to short term VR fixes in order to > make it more modular, as well as API driven, rather than the currently > SSH JSON injections. > > A number of possible alternatives were also brought up to see what > VR feature coverage could be handled by other virtual appliances > currently out on the market. > > > These included (but not limited to): > > > VyOS (current PR out there for integration via a plugin – thanks > Matthew!) > > Microtek (Commerical) > > Openswitch/Flexswitch > > Cloud Router > > > The second major topic of the day was related to how we want to > integrate networking moving forward. > > > A fair number of individuals felt that we shouldn't be focusing so > much on integrating network functions, but relying on other network > orchestrators to hand this. > > It was also noted that what draws a lot of people to ACS is the > fact we have a VR and do provide these functions out of the box. > > > We discussed how we could standardize the network sub system to > use some sort of queuing bus to make it easier for others projects to > integrate their solutions. > > The current plugin implementation is fairly complex and often > other projects (or commercial entities) put it into the too hard > basket, until someone either does it themselves or is willing to pay for the > development. > > Most also felt it was important to maintain a default network > function that works out of the box so that the complexity of a full > orchestrator could be avoided if not needed. > > > I'm sure I've missed some key points, so hopefully this starts a > discussion with the entire community of where we focused next. > > > Thanks to all those that participated on Tuesday afternoon. > > > - Si > > > > > daan.hoogl...@shapeblue.com > www.shapeblue.com > 53 Chandos Place, Covent Garden, London WC2N 4HSUK @shapeblue > > > > -- Rafael Weingärtner
