Edge computing takeaways from the Project Teams Gathering

After the Open Infrastructure Summit, the Project Teams Gathering (PTG) offered time and space for developers to continue discussions they started at the Forum and prep for the upcoming release cycles by diving deep into technical specs. This post offers recap and how you can get involved moving forward.

The Edge Computing Group met for a half-day session that included cross-project sessions with TripleO and Ironic. The group agreed on a few changes to its planned mission statement, then discussed testing the reference architecture models the group has identified to date. After multiple organizations offered hardware resources, the group decided to examine requirements to deploy reference implementations in different places.

At the TripleO session, people talked about their work on the distributed compute node architecture model and agreed the teams will try to maintain closer ties since TripleO’s testing work has a lot of overlap with the edge group’s reference architecture models. The two teams will collaborate on collecting and documenting experiences and feedback about the deployment options to make sure that the gaps are identified and addressed as well as writing up some best practices.

Bare metal came up during the joint TripleO session and the discussion ended up as one hot topics on the half-day agenda. There was a lot of interest around the L3 provisioning work, DHCP-related items and firmware updates were touched on as well. The session wrapped up with a short discussion about networking requirements and potential feature enhancements for Neutron around segmentation enhancements and L2 connectivity between locations.

StarlingX had one-and-a-half days to discuss a range of topics from processes to release planning. Similarly to the edge group, discussions began with formalizing a project mission statement. Then it was on to more technical topics like project deliverables and deciding what the community will put effort into testing and where concepts like third-party continuous integration are applicable. During the PTG session, participants leanded towards building one reference implementation and relying on the community for variations on options for things like the underlying operating system choices while making the platform flexible.

The next topic was testing, which brought session participants to brainstorm at the whiteboard. The community still has work to do in order to build up frameworks for higher-level testing like running system tests to make sure the platform is robust, flexible and reliable. Attendees set up plans and a proposal to prioritize the work with the goal of devising a community roadmap.

That left the rest of the available time to discuss the release process and, more importantly, release content that the community can put on their radar for the upcoming two or three releases. Participants decided that StarlingX will follow the OpenStack cycle because it integrates several OpenStack components and follows some of the current OS community processes.

Discussions about features included various topics from containerization, storage to monitoring and provisioning. The session Etherpads contain notes on various topics covered, including the estimated timelines for feature releases. Some of the topics around containers were the continuation of the Forum sessions while there were further items as well like containerizing Ceph and OVS-DPDK as part of the StarlingX platform.

Last but not least, time was spent discussing outreach and onboarding new contributors. One of the follow-up tasks is to set up a First Contact Special Interest Group to form a group of people to help newcomers.

Get involved

It’s impossible to summarize six days of hallway discussions or session-long back-and-forths in a blog post! If you’d like to learn more, catch the session videos, browse the PTG Etherpads and reach out to the communities on mailing lists and IRC to follow up on any questions you may have.

Looking ahead, the next Open Infra Summit will take place in Shanghai November 4-6. The call for papers and Travel Support Program are currently open.

Tags: bare metal, Ceph, edge, Ironic, OVS-DPDK, StarlingX