I'm posting this to the mailing list to summarize my notes from a meeting at 
5pm yesterday at Summit relative to Zaqar and lightweight multi-tenant 
messaging and how it may be applicable to a number of projects.

I'll begin by saying these are not 'minutes' of a meeting, merely my notes and 
observations after the meeting and how they relate specifically to Trove. I 
don't claim to speak for Trove, other contributors to Trove, other projects who 
were at the meeting, for zaqar, etc., etc.,

After the meeting I think I have a slightly better understanding of what Zaqar 
is but I am still not entirely sure. As best as I can tell, it is a 
lightweight, keystone authenticated, multi-tenant messaging system. I am still 
a little troubled that of the many people in the room who were knowledgeable of 
zaqar, there appeared to be some disagreement on how best to describe or 
explain the project.

I learned that users of zaqar can authenticate with keystone and then interact 
with zaqar, and pass messages using it. I learned also that zaqar is spelt with 
a 'q' that is not followed by a 'u'. i.e. it isn't zaquar as I had thought it 
was.

It became clear that the underlying transport in zaqar is not based on an 
existing AMQP service, rather zaqar is a "from the ground up" implementation. 
This scares me (a lot).

I gather there is currently no oslo.messaging integration with zaqar; for Trove 
to use zaqar we would have to either (a) abandon oslo.messaging and use zaqar, 
or (b) build in smarts within Trove to determine at run time whether we are 
using zaqar or o.m and implement code in Trove to handle the differences 
between them if any.

It wasn't clear to me after the meeting what differences there may be with 
Trove; one which was alluded to was the inability to do a synchronous (call()) 
style message and the statement was that this was something that "could be 
built into a driver".

It wasn't clear to me what scale zaqar has been run at and whether anyone has 
in fact deployed and run zaqar at scale, and whether it has been battle 
hardened the way a service like RabbitMQ has. While I hear from many that 
RabbitMQ is a nightmare to scale and manage, I realize that it does in fact 
have a long history of deployments at scale.

We discussed some of the assumptions being made in the conversation relative to 
the security of the various parties to the communication on the existing rabbit 
message queue and at the conclusion of the meeting I believe we left things as 
below.


(a)Zaqar would be more appealing if it had a simple oslo.messaging driver and 
an easier path to integration by client projects like Trove. The 
rip-and-replace option put a certain damper on the enthusiasm

(b)Even with an o.m integration, the incremental benefits that zaqar brought 
were diminished by the fact that one would still have to operate an AMQP 
(RabbitMQ) service for the rest of the infrastructure message passing needs 
unless and until all projects decide to abandon RabbitMQ in favor of zaqar

(c)At this time it is likely that there is no net benefit to a project like 
Trove in integrating with zaqar given that the upside is likely limited, the 
downside(s) that we know of are significant, and there is a significant unknown 
risk.

My thanks to the folks from zaqar for having the session, I certainly learnt a 
lot more about the project, and about openstack.

Let me conclude where I began, by saying the preceding is not a 'minutes of the 
meeting', merely my notes from the meeting.

Thanks,

-amrith
__________________________________________________________________________
OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev

Reply via email to