Past internship ideas

Documentation

Mentors:

• • loquacities on IRC / openstack at lanabrindley dot com
  • asettle on IRC/ alexandra dot settle at rackspace dot com

• Assist with the RST conversion of the Admin User Guide

• Help with the Networking Guide: either with content, copyediting, or the RST conversion.

• General bug work (find something interesting and work on it). This would look great on her resume as it's a solid visible contribution, but would also hopefully pay down some of our technical debt.

• Choose a book/section of interest, and research and update that section. A good candidate here would be the API guides.

Community

To be announced

Mentors:

• • hodepodge on IRC / chris at openstack org
  • EmilienM on IRC / emilien at redhat com
  • reed in IRC / stefano at openstack org

Coding

See also Ideas pages.

Neutron - metering agent add port statistics

Description:

In Neutron the metering agent [1] collects statistics regarding bandwidth usage. Right now it only measure the bandwidth used by routers. The idea is to extend it and provide statistics also for ports. In the first implementation only openvswitch will be supported, since we will use openvswitch tools to get the port statistics. The first step will be getting familiar with the metering agent and with Neutron in general. Then you will approach openvswitch tools and think about how to use them for this project. After that you can reach out to the community to collect and discuss ideas. Neutron folks are pretty active on #openstack-neutron channel most of the time and would be willing to share their opinions on this or any other project. You'll submit your code upstream and address the comments you get till your patch gets merged.

Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/port-statistics

Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.

Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge

Nice-to-have knowledge: Python, Openvswitch

Mentors: Rossella Sblendido

Redis jobboards

The spec @ https://review.openstack.org/#/c/105298/ basically explains all of this (the why, what and where).

Difficulty
Topics	TaskFlow, Distributed Systems
Required skills	Python
Extra skills	Distributed Systems
Mentor	Joshua Harlow (harlowja)

Policy | Policy enforcement in OpenStack: Nova Scheduling and Policy integration

Difficulty
Topics	Policy, Nova
Required skills
Extra skills
Mentor

Test results dashboard

Tasks:

    * Create an infra hosted dashboard view of testing results (both check/gate and periodic)

Difficulty
Topics
Required skills
Extra skills
Mentor

Policy | Policy-based intent-driven OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure

See an example case study here: Meta-data Driven Cloud - Running OpenStack @ Scale Using a Policy Framework

Tasks:

    * Extension of intent-based policy framework to Compute and Storage
    * Policy-based service composition integration with OpenDaylight

Difficulty	Moderate to Advanced
Topics	Functional and scenario testing framework
Required skills	OpenStack, Python
Extra skills
Mentor	Sumit Naiksatam, Magesh GV

Rich Network Services in a Federated OpenStack Public Cloud

L4-7 Services' integration, NFV, service function chaining, OpenDaylight

Difficulty	Moderate to Advanced
Topics	Functional and scenario testing framework
Required skills	OpenStack, Python
Extra skills
Mentor	Sumit Naiksatam, Magesh GV

Understand OpenStack Operations via Insights from Logs and Metrics: A Data Science Perspective

Tasks:

    *  How do we make sense out of logs?
    *  How do we set up alarms based on specific events (identify events)
    *  Anomaly detection from Logs

Difficulty
Topics
Required skills	Experience/interest in algorithms
Extra skills
Mentor

Keystone | Dynamic Policy

The general idea is described at the blog post Dynamic Policy in Keystone, by Adam Young.

Difficulty	Medium
Topics	Keystone
Required skills	Python
Extra skills
Mentor	David Stanek (dstanek), Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz (samueldmq)

Keystone | Tokenless Operations

The general idea is described at the blog post Who can sign for what?, by Adam Young. In few words, the fact of the signature on a document be valid does not mean that the signer was authorized to sign it.

The proposed challenge is to create, based on existing mechanisms, an extension to Keystone client able to check if the the signer of a token was effectively authorized to sign tokens.

Tasks:

    *  Extract signer data out of the certificates;
    *  Fetch the complete list of certificate from Keystone using the OS-SIMPLE-CERT extension;
    *  Match the signer to the cert to validate the signature and extract the domain data for the token;
    *  Fetch the mapping info from the Federation extension;
    *  Use the mapping info to convert from the signing cert to a keystone user and groups;
    *  Fetch the effective roles from Keystone for the user/groups for that domain;
    *  Fetch policy from Keystone;
    *  Execute the policy check to validate that the signer could sign for the data.

Difficulty	Medium
Topics	Keystone
Required skills	Python
Extra skills
Mentor	David Stanek (dstanek), Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz (samueldmq)

Ceilometer

Mentor: Dina Belova

Ceilometer team is currently working on new Time-Series storage concept for metrics. For now Gnocchi (Telemetry Stackforge project where we're trying to implement this kind of effort) lacks of the backend support (only Swift in place, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB still in progress). There is some interest to use Ceph directly instead of it. So we need direct-to-ceph usage from Gnocchi, possibly via the rados gateway REST API (as opposed to ceph-sitting-behind-swift-proxy as an alternative storage driver for Swift itself).

Trove

Mentor: Iccha Sethi

Description: MySQL replication enhancements

Work on trove enhancements for mysql replication.

Glance - Swift ranged uploads

Note(nikhil_k): This is a really challenging project. It would need a lot of research and motivation from candidate to perform the tasks. The tasks would also need to be defined by the candidate themselves to have a good "concurrent" distributed system as a end-result.

Description: We currently retry the entire upload process if it fails. Need to add the ranged uploads logic from swift store to improve performance. Target repo - openstack/glance_store

Glance folks are pretty active on #openstack-glance channel most of the time and would be willing to share their opinions on this or any other project. Please reach out on IRC to get a detailed information on this.

Related blueprint: TBA

Expected results: Patchsets submitted for review, reviewed by community members.

Knowledge prerequisites: programming knowledge

Nice-to-have knowledge: Python

Mentors: Nikhil Komawar

Swift - storage server OPTIONS support and checker tool

Many times new deployers get mysterious errors after first setting up their Swift clusters. Most of the time, the errors are because the values in the ring are incorrect (e.g. a bad port number). We need a way to validate that the rings actually match the deployment.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.7 talks about the OPTIONS verb. Swift's proxy server already supports OPTIONS, but the storage nodes do not. The first task is to implement OPTIONS on the account, container, and object servers.

Once the "OPTIONS *" functionality is implemented, swift-recon can be updated to include a ring checker. This checker would look at the ring and validate that there is something running on the server endpoints listed in the ring. Furthermore it would be able to actually check that the endpoint, if it's a real endpoint, is the right kind of endpoint (e.g. actually check that it's an object server). swift-recon would then generate a report of any found issues in the cluster.

Expected results: patches written, submitted for review, and reviewed by the community

Knowledge prerequisites: Python programming knowledge

Nice-to-have knowledge: familiarity with HTTP protocols

Mentors: John Dickinson

WIP Schedule: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/iaR4TQZ7NP

Swift/Swift3 - Improve S3 compatibility layer

Improve the Swift3 middleware to get better S3 API coverage

https://github.com/stackforge/swift3

Mentors: John Dickinson

Proposed by applicants

Keystone - Implementation of Attribute and Graph Based Access Control Model (AGBAC) for Openstack

Proposed by: Tahmina Ahmed - Tahmina

Description: The Core Openstack Access Control Module according to identity API V3 (user, token,project, domain, group, role association) [0] can be abstracted as a graph:

Attribute of different entities and the relationship between them and attribute of the relationship can be expressed through property graph [2] where entities are nodes and relationships are edges and both nodes and edges has attribute. Using entities and their attributes and relationship between entities and attribute of relationship to specify authorization policy will allow a system to have more finer grained access control model. For this representation, OpenStack entities (user, group, role, project, domain) are represented as nodes in the graph and the attributes and association between any two of them can be depicted as attributed edges. Given that a role is associated with a user and a project where the association is temporal, if we can say that the association is only active from 8am to 5pm this is something to say about the user- project- role association. We can express this as an attribute of the user- project and project - role association edge and use this for authorization to findout active roles.

This implementation plan is to make minimum impact on services outside keystone.So the plan is to like computing authorization path specification for a certain time when user requests for a token and and return a list of active roles. In that case this extension to the authorization model is transparent to all other openstack services like nova, glance, cynder etc.

Steps to Implement AGBAC in Openstack

1. Define API and Storage for Specifying Attributes of different entities 2. Define storage Assignment Attributes. 3. Define API to set the entity attributes 4. Define API to set the association attributes 5. A Policy specification storage that would specify path based policy to compute roles. 6. A Compute function that would compute the roles using entites, their attributes relationship between entities attribute of relationships and policy.

[0] Bo Tang and Ravi Sandhu, Extending Openstack Access Control With Domain Trust. In Proceedings 8th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2014), Xi'an, China, October 15-17, 2014, 15 pages

[1] http://neo4j.com/

[2] Rodriguez, Marko A., and Peter Neubauer. "Constructions from dots and lines." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 36.6 (2010): 35-41.

Design

Persona research and design for Horizon UI

Description: There has been some initial work done in a few different areas around generating Personas for the Horizon UI. This task/project would allow someone to lead the effort to pull the research together, perhaps perform further end-user interviews or surveys, analyze data, form groups of personas, and put together an initial set of target Horizon personas that we can use during requirements gathering, design phases, and general discussion.

Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ux/+spec/horizon-personas

Expected results: Initial set of Personas for people to use during requirements gathering, design phases, and general discussion of our target Horizon users.

Knowledge prerequisites: basic interviewing skills, willingness to talk with a lot of new people, readiness to listen and report back findings

Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design basics

Mentors: Ju Lim

Redesign for the Object Storage -> Containers section in Horizon

Description:

Currently, there is a section under the Object Storage panel that allows users (e.g. Consumers and/or Project Administrators) to Create, Delete, and Edit Containers. It would be great to do a little bit of research into identifying the use cases around these features and then proposing a redesign of these features based on the findings. This will include learning some basic Usability best practices and applying them to a design. The design would be done in wireframe format, so it could be done in any tool that allows for this. The design would be reviewed on the UX AskBot site, a new blueprint would need to be created as well. This would take a new designer through the process that currently exists for proposing an updated design to a current feature in Horizon.

Related blueprint: N/A (To be created by intern as part of process)

Expected results: Redesign of "Containers" section in Object Storage panel proposed and approved by Horizon community.

Knowledge prerequisites: basic sketching or wireframing skills

Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design basics

Mentor: Ju Lim

Horizon Concept Review and Usability Testing

Description: There has been very little work done around Horizon UI concept reviews and usability testing. This task/project would allow someone to lead the effort to put together a test plan, identify customers as test participants, conduct (contextual) inquiry / interview, survey users, analyze data to share results / findings with the community findings regarding how current production OpenStack users are using the software, their use cases, and whether the Horizon UI meets their needs. Along the way, you may identify areas of improvement, concepts that need further refinement, and new use cases or opportunities that have not yet been addressed.

Related blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-ux/+spec/baseline-horizon-usability-testing

Expected results: (1) Identify a community of users willing to participate in Horizon UI usability testing and participate in various OpenStack concept reviews. (2) Share usability test findings with the community that will be used for design and general Horizon discussions.

Knowledge prerequisites: usability testing skills, basic interviewing skills, willingness to talk with a lot of new people, readiness to listen and report back findings, ability to analyze data to find patterns.

Nice-to-have knowledge: User Experience Design and/or User Research basics

Mentors: Ju Lim