OpenStack’s big tent keeps expanding: two of the newest projects are Openstacksalt and Watcher.

We’ll give you a quick overview of them and find out how you can get involved from the project team leads (PTLs).

Openstacksalt

What
The OpenStack-salt project brings together the best open source technologies to drive large-scale OpenStack deployments with SaltStack as an integration service.

Who Ales Komarek, PTL, a software architect for tcp cloud.

What new features/enhancements/fixes are expected for the Newton release?

There are a number of new features that are focused on improving the workflow
automation to provide the full life cycle management capabilities both for host
services and container micro-services.

The ability to run OpenStack control plane in containers as well as in
virtual machine services from the same configuration origin. This gives you
great versatility to use containers for just some or for all services within system.
The complete testing environment that lets you test and share any Gerrit
review or predefined environment. This lets you share your development and
testing setups easily, actually can serve as proof-of-concept (POC) as a service.
Many new service backends are implemented (DVR, Midokura for example for Neutron). As well as the Murano and Swift services, which will end up in the official repositories soon.
Many services already have their support formulas defined. These include monitoring, metering, logging, firewalls, backups and documentation.

What contributions do you need most from the community?

We would love the community to try, test and then use our solution in production.

There are several areas where we really need your support:

Our new testing environment needs more testing and cover all the edge cases
it has been created for.
The backends are easily expandable and any new Neutron, Cinder or Nova plugins are welcome along any OpenStack services. Please feel free to contribute any plugin or OpenStack service.

Thank you for the opportunity to share our work and vision with this wonderful community and I’m looking forward to see how it helps to solve our day-to-day pains either by inspiration or better by using the Openstack-salt project. Get in touch at our weekly irc meetings (see info below.)

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions.
For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the relevant tag [openstacksalt]

The team holds meetings Tuesdays at UTC 1300 in #openstack-salt (IRC)

Watcher

What
Watcher’s goal is to provide a flexible and scalable resource optimization service for multi-tenant OpenStack-based clouds.

Who Antoine Cabot, Watcher PTL. He’s also head of the cloud computing lab at research institute IRT B-COM.

What new features/enhancements/fixes are expected for the Newton release?

Watcher joined the OpenStack Big Tent during the Newton cycle, our top priority is to rely on existing OpenStack components to help accomplish the Watcher mission.

We are working with Nova, Telemetry, Monasca and Congress teams to collect metrics and handle constraints between virtual machines. Watcher is a framework that allows any administrator to build their own optimization strategy, so our main focus is to make it easier to do that at the end of the cycle. We will also work on scalability tests because Watcher optimization gains will be significant for an infrastructure above 30 nodes compared to a "manual" optimization.

In the first official release, Watcher will provide the following features:

Run an audit of your infrastructure to identify optimization opportunities.
Audit will return an action plan with efficacy indicators associated (number of migrations
needed, for example.)
Run the action plan and give feedback on the completion state.

What contributions do you need most from the community?

We are looking for operators who need to optimize their OpenStack clusters for business use cases that can be tackled in Watcher. We are also looking for new contributors to build Watcher optimization strategies to demonstrate the real value of the framework in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction.

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions.
For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the relevant tag [watcher]

The team holds meetings Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC on even weeks, 9:00 UTC on odd weeks, in #openstack-meeting-4 (IRC)

Cover Photo // CC BY NC