Lifeless/ArchitectureThoughts

I'm gathering notes and thoughts about our big picture architecture at the moment, seeking to understand how we ended up with things like rpc-over-rabbit (which is a really bad fit for RPC), or the nova-compute -> neutron-api-> neutron-ovs-agent -> nova-api -> nova-compute VIF plugging weirdness.

Its a group effort - current collaborators, Joe Gordon, Gus Lees, Matthew Treinish. Ideally we'd have someone familiar with all the early projects and their split-outs to aid with insight.... drop me a mail if you're interested! [or just dive in and annotate these thoughts].

I'm not using etherpad because its too hard to track deltas there - its great for realtime collaboration, not so much for evolving over weeks/months.

What do our users want

* User survey 2014: "Specifically drawing out the comments around neutron, over 61% of them were general concerns, including performance, stability and ease of use.High Availability ranked second (11%), with SDN use cases and IPv6 requirements following (7%) ... On the more technical side, the modular architecture was seen to provide a big advantage. Flexible, fixable, self-service, extensible, modifiable, adaptable, hardware and vendor agnostic, interoperable were key words commonly sighted.

The API becoming a defacto standard and the good user experience were also positively mentioned."

Goals of an architecture

An architecture isn't a control mechanism - its a planning tool: it makes the context for decisions explicit, and articulates the broad principles involved so that we can all be discussing our decisions in a shared context.