Tag Archives: openstack

Hong Kong (OpenStack Summit)

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I’ll be in Hong Kong for the upcoming OpenStack Summit Nov 5-8. I’d be thrilled to talk database things with others present, especially around Trove DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) and high availability MySQL for OpenStack deployments.

I was last in Hong Kong in 2010 when I worked for Rackspace. The closest office to me was in Hong Kong so that’s where I did my HR onboarding training. I remember telling friends on the Sunday night before leaving for Hong Kong that I may be able to make dinner later in the week purely depending on if somebody got back to me on if I was going to Hong Kong that week. I was, and I went. I took some photos while there.

Walking from the hotel where we were staying to the Rackspace office could be done pretty much entirely through buildings without going outside. There were bits of art around too, which is just kind of awesome – I’m always in favour of random art.
Statues in walkways

The photo below was the view from my hotel room. The OpenStack summit is just by the airport rather than in the middle of town, so the views will be decidedly different to this, but still probably quite spectacular if you’re around the right place (I plan to take camera gear, so shout if you want to journey too)
Hotel Window (Hong Kong)

There are some pretty awesome markets around Hong Kong offering just about everything you’d want, including a lot just out on the street.
Java Road
Hong Kong Street Market

Nightime was pretty awesome, having people from around the world journey out into the night was great.
Rackers walking Hong Kong at Night

I was there during the World Cup, and the streets were wonderfully decorated. I’m particularly proud of this photo as it was handheld, at night, after beer.
Hong Kong streetlife

DevStack woes

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DevStack is meant to be a three step “get me an openstack dev environment” thing. You’re meant to be able to grab a fresh installation of something like Ubuntu 12.04 or Fedora and “git clone $foo && cd devstack && ./stack.sh”, wait a while and then be able to launch instances.

This much does work.

What does not work is being able to ssh to those instances. The networking is completely and utterly broken. I have tried both Ubuntu and Fedora in a fresh VM (KVM, on an Ubuntu host) and have asked a variety of experts for help. No dice.

What I want to hear is a way to remotely get it going locally, in a VM.

At the moment I’m tempted to submit a pull request to the devstack website adding a 4th step of “muck around for a few days before giving up on ever being able to ssh into a launched instance as these instructions are wrong”.

HOWTO screw up launching a free software project

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Josh Berkus gave a great talk at linux.conf.au 2010 (the CFP for linux.conf.au 2011 is open until August 7th) entitled “How to destroy your community” (lwn coverage). It was a simple, patented, 10 step program, finely homed over time to have maximum effect. Each step is simple and we can all name a dozen companies that have done at least three of them.

Simon Phipps this past week at OSCON talked about Open Source Continuity in practice – specifically mentioning some open source software projects that were at Sun but have since been abandoned by Oracle and different strategies you can put in place to ensure your software survives, and check lists for software you use to see if it will survive.

So what can you do to not destroy your community, but ensure you never get one to begin with?

Similar to destroying your community, you can just make it hard: “#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools.”

#1 A Contributor License Agreement and Copyright Assignment.

If you happen to be in the unfortunate situation of being employed, this means you get to talk to lawyers. While your employer may well have an excellent Open Source Contribution Policy that lets you hack on GPL software on nights and weekends without a problem – if you’re handing over all the rights to another company – there gets to be lawyer time.

Your 1hr of contribution has now just ballooned. You’re going to use up resources of your employer (hey, lawyers are not cheap), it’s going to suck up your work time talking to them, and if you can get away from this in under several hours over a few weeks, you’re doing amazingly well – especially if you work for a large company.

If you are the kind of person with strong moral convictions, this is a non-starter. It is completely valid to not want to waste your employers’ time and money for a weekend project.

People scratching their own itch, however small is how free software gets to be so awesome.

I think we got this almost right with OpenStack. If you compare the agreement to the Apache License, there’s so much common wording it ends up pretty much saying that you agree you are able to submit things to the project under the Apache license.  This (of course) makes the entire thing pretty redundant as if people are going to be dishonest about submitting things under the Apache licnese there’s no reason they’re not going to be dishonest and sign this too.

You could also never make it about people – just make it about your company.

#2 Make it all about the company, and never about the project

People are not going to show up, do free work for you to make your company big, huge and yourself rich.

People are self serving. They see software they want only a few patches away, they see software that serves their company only a few patches away. They see software that is an excellent starting point for something totally different.

I’m not sure why this is down at number three… it’s possibly the biggest one for danger signs that you’re going to destroy something that doesn’t even yet exist…

#3 Open Core

This pretty much automatically means that you’re not going to accept certain patches for reasons of increasing your own company’s short term profit. i.e. software is no longer judged on technical merits, but rather political ones.

There is enough politics in free software as it is, creating more is not a feature.

So when people ask me about how I think the OpenStack launch went, I really want people to know how amazing it can be to just not fuck it up to begin with. Initial damage is very, very hard to ever undo. The number of Open Source software projects originally coming out of a company that are long running, have a wide variety of contributors and survive the original company are much smaller than you think.

PostgreSQL has survived many companies coming and going around it, and is stronger than ever. MySQL only has a developer community around it almost in spite of the companies that have shepherded the project. With Drizzle I think we’ve been doing okay – I think we need to work on some things, but they’re more generic to teams of people working on software in general rather than anything to do with a company.