Blog
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One the joys (or miseries) of working on OpenStack client tooling is that you get exposed to all the nuances of the OpenStack API tooling. The microservice-like architecture, with projects being managed by often wholly separate teams, means there’s precious little consistency across APIs, beyond that enforced by the long-dormant API SIG. I’ve touched on this before, covering things like the disparity in API versioning, and its been particularly notable during work on the [OpenAPI effort]. OpenStack is also pretty old (at least in software terms) and most service APIs come with at least a decade of baggage: there is an abundance of APIs that still exist in services but are no longer relevant or useful in modern deployments.
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I previously presented on our work to bring OpenAPI to OpenStack as part of the 2024 OpenInfra Summit Asia, the slides for which you can find here. Since that talk, another release cycle has come and gone and our work has continued to progress. Below is a summary of the current “state of play” for OpenAPI support in OpenStack and a reminder of our long-term goals in the area.
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I’ve recently found myself once again working on the OpenStack Cinder CSI Driver and the Operator that OpenShift uses to deploy this. This work has inspired me to improve my knowledge of how the Cinder CSI Driver - and CSI drivers in general - work. Below is my current high-level understanding of both as well as a quick summary of changes we are making to the Cinder CSI Driver Operator in OpenShift 4.19.
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It’s an often overlooked fact that OpenStack has two wholly different mechanisms for provisioning block devices for instances. While most people are aware of the Block Storage service, Cinder, not everyone is aware of or gives much thought to the various types of block devices or “ephemeral” storage that the Compute service, Nova, is able to provide. This article serves to provide a high-level overview and comparison of these two different mechanisms, including examples of how you can use them and some hopefully (interesting) asides.
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After seeing a few too many availability zone-related issues popping up in OpenShift clusters of late, I’ve decided it might make sense to document the situation with OpenStack AZs on OpenShift (and, by extension, Kubernetes). This is the second part of two. The first part provided some background on what AZs are and how you can configure them, while this part will examine how AZs affect OpenShift and Kubernetes components such as the OpenStack Machine API Provider, the OpenStack Cluster API Provider, and the Cinder and Manila CSI drivers.
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Talks
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This talk was delivered during the OpenInfra Summit Asia in Suwon in September 2024. It focused on two efforts currently underway in the OpenStack community, one to add OpenAPI schema generation to many services, and another to add type annotations to the SDK and OpenStackClient.
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This talk was delivered at PyCon Ireland 2022. As the name would suggest, I aimed to describe how to implement a database upgrade pattern using SQLAlchemy + Alembic that would allow you to evolve you database schema without incurring downtime.
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This talk was a lightning talk I gave at PyCon Ireland 2022. There’s no real abstract.