00:01:04 <ekcs> #startmeeting congressteammeeting
00:01:05 <openstack> Meeting started Thu Jul 13 00:01:04 2017 UTC and is due to finish in 60 minutes.  The chair is ekcs. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
00:01:06 <openstack> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic #startvote.
00:01:09 <openstack> The meeting name has been set to 'congressteammeeting'
00:01:21 <ekcs> Hi all! as usual, topics are here: #link https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/congress-meeting-topics
00:01:49 <ekcs> please take a moment to look it over and add/comment is needed =)
00:02:13 <ramineni_> Hi
00:02:39 <ramineni_> ekcs: hi
00:03:25 <masahito> hi
00:03:35 <ekcs> hi ramineni_ !
00:03:38 <ekcs> hi masahito !
00:04:55 <ekcs> ok let’s get started then!
00:04:57 <pcregut1> hi, pcregut (P. Crégut) from Orange. Valentin should also be present for talking about Congress for config files as asked by ekcs.
00:05:37 <ekcs> hi pcregut1 ! great to have you guys!
00:05:58 <vmatt> Hi everyone
00:06:30 <masahito> pcregut1: vmatt: hi welcome!
00:06:35 <ekcs> hi vmatt ! great to connect with you guys.
00:06:54 <ramineni_> pcregut1: vmatt : hi
00:07:53 <ekcs> thanks for joining. I’m guessing it’s really late hour for you guys, but I’d like to have thinrichs here if possible. is it ok if we start on another topic until he gets here (hopefully soon)?
00:08:16 <pcregut1> yes fine for me.
00:09:17 <ekcs> ok then.
00:09:21 <ekcs> #topic announcements
00:09:29 <ekcs> Only announcement I have is the PTG.
00:09:38 <ekcs> https://www.openstack.org/ptg/
00:09:39 <ekcs> Monday - Friday, September 11-15, 2017
00:09:39 <ekcs> Congress sessions: Wed-Thu
00:09:51 <ekcs> Good to start making travel plans now if you are going to come =)
00:10:07 <ekcs> anything else on the PTG or any other announcements?
00:11:35 <ekcs> ok moving on then.
00:11:37 <ekcs> #topic pike-3
00:12:07 <ekcs> reminder that pike-3 and feature freeze is coming up in less than 2 weeks (the week of 7/24)
00:12:49 <ramineni_> Final release is August end right
00:13:01 <ekcs> So anything related to new feature should be checked in soon. I think ramineni_ and I still have some new feature related things.
00:13:15 <ekcs> yes. RC1 is 8/7.
00:13:24 <ekcs> oh sorry final release.
00:13:27 <ekcs> yes something like that.
00:14:02 <ramineni_> ekcs: ok
00:15:10 <ekcs> On the policy library front, I have a client patch up to give the minimal functionality of importing policy from a file.
00:15:52 <ekcs> WIP. hoping to finish some testing touch-ups today. https://review.openstack.org/#/c/483132/
00:16:16 <ramineni_> Monitoring violations part .. I'll try to complete by next week
00:16:39 <ekcs> that along with this patch (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/479167/) would give the most basic functionality of policy library.
00:17:14 <ekcs> and then it’s bonus if we can get more done like GUI for example or more CLI usage.
00:17:16 <ekcs> got it thanks ramineni_ !
00:17:37 <ekcs> anything else on pike-3 related?
00:18:50 <ekcs> ok moving on then.
00:18:53 <ekcs> #topic Congress for config files
00:19:27 <ekcs> pcregut1 and vmatt would you like to start us off?
00:19:49 <pcregut1> I can summarize the context and why we want it.
00:19:50 <ekcs> we had already mentioned at a previous meeting the discussion on ML.
00:19:59 <ekcs> thanks pcregut1 !
00:20:54 <pcregut1> As a telco we have more than one instance of Openstack, operated by different teams, designed by several teams (corporate, countries) with potentially several vendors.
00:21:34 <pcregut1> Sure we use installers but how do we track requirements on what should be our configs ?
00:22:31 <pcregut1> How do we migrate from one solution to another ? Add requirements. A script + another script is not a valid script.
00:23:40 <pcregut1> So we first experimented with custom made rules in a small prototype. Tried to see if we could use something like JBoss Rules.
00:24:09 <pcregut1> And realised that we already had a rule engine in Openstack : Congress.
00:25:03 <pcregut1> That is where vmatt work started and he made a datasource for config files following the oslo.config standard for congress.
00:25:52 <pcregut1> The main difference is that there are files every where and not a nice API to serve them
00:26:11 <ekcs> that’s very cool.
00:26:58 <pcregut1> So he implemented a small agent that talks on the message bus and gives files but also their structure (namespace, templates) to the datasource driver in congress.
00:27:49 <pcregut1> Now we are cleaning up so that it can be a proposal that we can opensource to everybody.
00:28:46 <ekcs> that’s very interesting.
00:28:47 <pcregut1> that's the summary.
00:29:02 <ramineni_> this agent where it will be installed
00:29:23 <masahito> that's nice!
00:29:31 <pcregut1> It has to be deployed on each node that we want to control.
00:29:39 <ramineni_> It needs to be on where cinfigs reside
00:29:49 <ramineni_> Ohk
00:30:07 <pcregut1> Today it requires a definition of each ini file location with the template it follows.
00:30:29 <pcregut1> One idea for a later improvement would be to have a hook in oslo.config
00:31:00 <ramineni_> Ok ..ya hook would be good idea
00:31:02 <pcregut1> It would be used to trigger the sending of the ini file from services.
00:31:34 <pcregut1> There is only little processing done on the agent file. The only real one is removing the value for secret options.
00:32:21 <ekcs> I’m very curious as to how this datasource driver you guys implemented works. is it a pull or a push model?
00:32:50 <vmatt> it is a pull model
00:33:34 <ramineni_> pcregut1: ok , great .. Thanks for the summary ..interesting idea
00:34:06 <pcregut1> but the pull action is a broadcast.
00:35:04 <ekcs> got it. I’m definitely curious to find out more about how the prototype is implemented and all that. but aside from all that it’s great to hear the application and the interest in upstreaming it.
00:35:24 <ekcs> how useful have you guys found the prototype in testing?
00:35:49 <ekcs> and also what kind of help can we give?
00:36:01 <pcregut1> So far the code is fresh and we have not enough experience with it.
00:37:13 <pcregut1> The main question is how useful the constraints can be knowing that we are blind on the configuration of nodes that is not covered by openstack files.
00:39:45 <ekcs> pcregut1: got it. so authoring and trying out policies is something we want to do?
00:40:05 <ekcs> are there difficulties you guys encountered or still encountering that we want to discuss?
00:40:29 <pcregut1> yes definitely. I think the starting point for us now is looking at constraints already existing in service documentation.
00:40:40 <ekcs> I’m curious about how you chose the schema for representing configs.
00:41:09 <ekcs> and I wonder if you have encountered any rule language limitations in trying to express the constraints you want.
00:41:16 <pcregut1> We really followed the structure of oslo.config
00:42:07 <pcregut1> The result is really verbose but with the help of intermediate relations vmatt obtained some nice rules.
00:42:15 <ekcs> when I saw the ML messages I thought about how to represent the configs. and it took some thought for me to think about how best to represent the options like dict and list.
00:43:08 <ekcs> I see. Anyway we can get an advanced peek at the rules and/or schema?
00:43:28 <pcregut1> This part is far from perfect. There is just sets of option value for lists and option key value for dicts.
00:44:07 <pcregut1> It limits the expressivity because we cannot speak of for example the length of the list.
00:45:34 <ekcs> got it. aggregation is one of the things we want to implement in congress language but have not gotten around to unfortunately.
00:46:18 <ekcs> so what are the next steps you envision and how can we help?
00:46:20 <pcregut1> That would definitely help. We can share the structure we have so far but they are really simple.
00:46:59 <pcregut1> We are cleaning up a spec that will go with the blueprint opened on launchpad by vmatt
00:47:46 <pcregut1> so then we need to insert it somewhere ? for queens ?
00:48:31 <ekcs> yea I think queens would make sense.
00:49:45 <ekcs> I’m definitely eager to see how much of the config requirements we can nicely capture with congress rules and where we still fall short.
00:50:17 <ekcs> Feel free to paste some rough rules here if you are ok with sharing them early.
00:50:22 <ekcs> #link https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/config-policy
00:50:37 <ekcs> or if not that’s ok too.
00:51:39 <pcregut1> We will do it when we have access to our regular work computer.
00:52:31 <ekcs> great thanks a lot!
00:53:48 <ekcs> anything more to discuss right now?
00:54:09 <ekcs> masahito: do you have any thoughts on this use case?
00:54:10 <pcregut1> Not for us. I think. Thanks a lot !
00:54:56 <ekcs> thanks pcregut1 and vmatt ! If you have any thoughts or questions or further discussion, feel free to find me on #congress channel or ML or email me directly (you have my email from ML).
00:55:07 <masahito> It sounds nice use case.
00:55:24 <masahito> we hit kinds of same situation deploying openstack on k8s.
00:57:00 <ekcs> ok oops just a couple minutes left.
00:57:06 <ekcs> #topic open discussion
00:57:09 <masahito> I heard there're some activities in the community that oslo.config will implement API for that purpose. I try to find the info and write down on the etherpad.
00:58:15 <ekcs> masahito: API for querying configs? API for specifying requirements for configs?
00:58:28 <masahito> ekcs: first one.
00:59:17 <vmatt> interesting information
00:59:32 <ekcs> masahito: gotcha. it would be really great if you can share things about the k8s situation that’s ok to share, and maybe we can see whether there is a rule that would’ve helped.
00:59:52 <masahito> I guess the API would help congress to querying config from each node.
01:00:54 <ekcs> ok time’s up for today. thanks everyone! thanks pcregut1 and vmatt for joining us!
01:01:29 <masahito> Thanks, bye
01:01:42 <ekcs> bye all!
01:01:46 <ekcs> #endmeeting