Projects/IncubatorApplicationCeilometer

Project codename: Ceilometer

Summary (one sentence abstract of the project): The project aims to deliver a unique point of contact for billing systems to aquire all meters they need to establish customer billing, accross all current and future OpenStack core components.

Detailed Description:

What is the purpose of the project and vision for it?

• Provide efficient collection of metering data, in terms of CPU and network costs.
• Allow deployers to integrate with the metering system directly or by replacing components.
• Data may be collected by monitoring notifications sent from existing services or by polling the infrastructure.
• Allow deployers to configure the type of data collected to meet their operating requirements.
• The data collected by the metering system is made visible to some users through a REST API.
• The metering messages are signed and non repudiable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation)

Describe the relevance of the project to other OpenStack projects and the OpenStack mission to provide a ubiquitous cloud computing platform:

• Currently each production cloud deployed using OpenStack needs to re implement it's own metering solution as OpenStack does not deliver a standard way to provide this to billing engines
• As each implement their own solution, there is
  • a massive amount of effort that is being duplicated
  • no standard way to collect information accross OpenStack projects
  • potential patches to collect unavailable information, specific to each cloud deployment, that are hard to maintain.
• What public cloud does not need to bill for its usage?
• What private cloud does not need, at least, to be able to inform its users of their use and cost?
• Access to metering information (and standardization of it) is a common requirement of cloud en user

Basic roadmap for the project:

• v1 delivered with Folsom as an incubated project with all functions required to collect base metering info and provide standard API access
• v2 delivered with G as a core project with (subject to variation)
  • End-User API access to own metering information
  • Integration of information summary as an Horizon plugin
  • New agents for other OpenStack components (Quantum Engines? Heat? etc...)

Location of project source code:

• https://launchpad.net/ceilometer

Programming language, required technology dependencies:

• Python
• Depends on openstack-common
• Agents depend on respective OpenStack project they cover

Is project currently open sourced? What license?:

• Apache 2 licensed

Level of maturity of software and team:

• High

Proposed project technical lead and qualifications:

• Currently co-lead by dachary and nijaba, election to be held at the end of July or beginning of august.
• Dachary is eNovance's research officer, more details can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo%C3%AFc_Dachary
• Nijaba is Canonical's Cloud Product Manager, some of his contribution can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NicolasBarcet

Other project developers and qualifications:

• dhellmann works at DreamHost, is a Member of the Python Foundation and some of his work is listed at http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/index.html
• jd__ works at eNovance on OpenStack, more details can be found at http://julien.danjou.info/experience/ (note this excellent analysis about swift eventual consistency and bottlenecks)

Infrastructure requirements (testing, etc):

• already integrated with gerrit and jenkins. Tests cases required for each submit.

Have all current contributors agreed to the OpenStack CLA?

• Yes

Status: To be completed by PPB

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