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Designate Newton Design Summit

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I started writing this on a plane on the way home from Austin, TX where we just finished up the Newton design summit for OpenStack, and finished it a few days later - please excuse any wierdness in syntax or flow :)

Austin was its usual weird, wacky, wonderful self. Everytime we are here, I have a great time, I just can't deal with the heat :).

The summit format this year worked really well - I pretty much stayed in the design summit hotel for the week - and got some very good work done.

6 Months On: Where are we

One of the things I did before this design summit was to look at what we had achived last cycle.

We had a quiet cycle overall, but we did merge some vital features.

Operators no longer need to use the awfull config format we created for pools in Kilo, we now have a much easier to read YAML file that is loaded into the database via the designate-manage cli, we now actually support multiple pools in a real way with the addition of a schedular in designate-central.

Where are we going?

So - the point of the design summit is to plan the future of the projects - and designate is no execption. We were in a (very nice boardroom) room for a few hours - and we talked through quite a few things.

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The collection of etherpads for the summit are available as well.

Golang Replacement of MiniDNS

One of the nicer things about our current architecture is the flexibility that we have because we use the standard DNS protocols to update the target DNS servers. This has the downside however, that we are writing code that deals with DNS packets in python, which is slow. timsim from RackSpace has writen a POC in go that has a very large perfomance improvement.

This needs to documented, and permission requested from the TC to move this component to Go, (and will be a separate post in its own right).

After we got back it turned out that we were not the only project considering this, and swift actually have a feature branch with code in place. So, based on this, we are going to collaborate with them on the integration of Go to OpenStack.

Worker Model

As we dicussed in Galway - we need to replace the current *-manager services with a generic service that can scale out horizontally. As part of this we planned out our upgrade and implementation plans for these services.

Docs, Deprications and more Docs

Docs were a common theme - we were asked to improve them, and also have them located in the main docs on the OpenStack.org website.

We had a member of the docs team in the room, who gave us some great guidenance on how to include our docs in the correct place.

VMT - The application process

On of the teams that supports OpenStack is the Vunrebility Management Team. They deal with disclosures and assigning OSSA numbers to issues that could present and issue to our deployers.

They had a session this summit on how that process might work, and designate was one of the projects chosen to be used as a pilot as I have previously produced Threat Analysis documentation for Designate inside of Hewlett Packard Enterprise - this information is currently being processed for release to the community.

Searchlight

Searchlight is a new (ish) project in OpenStack that enables true searching capabilities on clouds. We have a designate plugin, but there are issues with how we emit notifications from the v1 and the v2 API.

We decided that when we move the Horizon panels to v2, we will just listen for v2 notifications in Searchlight.

API Docs

There was an interesting session on how the community are moving to document their APIs. It will now reside in the projects repo, and is based on a custom sphinx extention that was written for OpenStack.

As this progresses we will migrate designate to these docs, and remove our current docs, as they are much harder to read.

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