Interview with Julien Dunge, OpenStack Ceilometer Project Manager
We present the fifth of a series of interviews with technical leaders of the OpenStack project in the Mirantis blog. Our goal is to educate the wider technical community and help people understand how they can contribute to and benefit from the OpenStack project. Naturally, below is the point of view of the interviewee, not of Mirantis.
Below we present an interview with Julien Danjou, technical manager of the OpenStack Ceilometer project.
Mirantis: Tell us about yourself.
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Julien Dange: I’m a freelancer, a free developer, I’ve been involved in many FOSS projects, and a Debian developer for more than a decade.
Q: What is your relationship history with OpenStack? Why are you involved in the project?
Answer: I started working on the OpenStack project with eNovance, which took me to work in late 2011 to create the first European cloud platform based on OpenStack. At that moment I had no idea what OpenStack was, but working on the open source IaaS platform in Python was very exciting, so I joined. Since then, the whole OpenStack ecosystem has been created and new technical challenges arise; enough reasons to take part!
Q: What is the difference between the OpenStack project and other open source projects in which you participated?
Answer: I would name pragmatism and a good choice of technologies among the differences, which may be the main features of a successful open source project.
In addition, many of the open source projects I have participated in or are participating in now have a sufficient number of users and developers who work on the project in their free time as a hobby. In OpenStack, almost every user or developer participates in a project on the instructions of his company. This makes the project much more dynamic, it grows faster than others, and gives us the opportunity to achieve ambitious goals in almost an instant.
Q: What is your responsibility as a technical project manager for Ceilometer?
A: I watch the project and guarantee the movement in a certain direction, which we took during the last gathering of developers in Portland. I also act as a kind of gluing between the project participants, since in any case I keep under control every area of ​​the project. The technical project manager is almost full-time, given the planned volume of project implementation under this release.
Q: Can you explain the role of the Ceilometer in the OpenStack project? What is the importance of the Ceilometer tool?
Answer: Most people who build their IaaS platform want to bill for the use of platform resources. Based on this first use case, we identified the role of the Ceilometer within OpenStack as the measurement site of the OpenStack platform. Then the scope has spread to a wider collection of meters that implement many different options, from billing to triggering alarm messages.
The goal of the Ceilometer project is to calculate everything that happens in the OpenStack platform in order to bill for this or in some other way to analyze.
Question: What is unique in the project, what is the breakthrough of the Ceilometer project?
Answer: The ability to have a single point of collection and survey of measurement results in the cloud, for operators and users, with the ability to generate events and actions based on these measurements. This is what will open the possibility of creating various applications that have never been seen before.
We are also not limited to OpenStack. Almost every area of ​​Ceilometer is extensible through the plugin, so you can build your own system for collecting measurement results, publish measurements to external systems, or measure your PaaS platform directly with a Ceilometer.
Q: What has the Ceilometer community achieved at the moment?
Answer: We built the project from scratch, embedding it in every component of OpenStack without any explicit intervention. After the results had been accumulated, we entered into the process of incubation, and then came out of it as an integrated project. And all this in just one year. After only 6 months of development, OpenStack operators used the Ceilometer to measure their platforms and to bill or collect funds for their use, while simultaneously generating gigabytes of measurement data per day.
Q: What features will Ceilometer provide in the release of OpenStack Havana?
Answer: I think we are one of the projects with the largest planned volume of implementation. At Havana, our main goal is alarm reporting functionality, which allows users and operators to generate events based on an assessment of measurement results. In addition, it will become a cornerstone for the Heat project, which will provide the ability to autoscale based on this functionality of the Ceilometer and related data.
We also plan and implement new measurement capabilities, such as network bandwidth measurement in Quantum and event planning in Nova, as well as improving our public API to allow us to perform thinner queries and get more detailed statistics sections.
Question: Which vendors are the most invested and provide plugins? Who would you like to see as a Ceilometer developer?
Answer: Now we do not have external developers who distribute plug-ins for Ceilometer. What is good is that all our plugins are open source software distributed with Ceilometer. All of them are part of the base code created by the developers of Ceilometer. Nevertheless, we will be happy to see contributions to systems on other platforms, not only on OpenStack, for example Ceph.
Question: Does the Ceilometer project still have “childhood diseases” - something that needs to be changed?
Answer: No, and in fact this was one of the criteria for exiting the incubation process. You cannot go with the project to the OpenStack platform if you know that you have to redo the project from scratch. So, we have diseases, but these are mistakes of an adult.
Question: What are typical usage guidelines?
Answer: The recommended method for Ceilometer is to deploy a project with fine-tuning that matches your needs in terms of auditing, billing, and statistics. Ceilometer generates a huge amount of measurement results, so you need to make sure that you generate the amount of data that meets your needs.
Question: What do you want people to know about the project (hidden features / functionality)?
Answer: I think that there is a lot of potential in the data collected by the Ceilometer tool. People usually see data as useful for billing, but they have much more value — from capacity planning to determining usage trends for your cloud platform. You can make deployment more convenient by directing this data to the right tools.
Q: Are there any common misconceptions regarding the Ceilometer?
Answer: We had some misconceptions at the beginning of the project, when people expected Ceilometer to print PDF accounts or monitor their platform and call the system administrator in case of failure. Now it's pretty clear that we are a warehouse of measurement results of OpenStack and you can use it to build any application on top of it, including billing or active monitoring. But we do not aim to provide this functionality.
Question: What are the prerequisites?
Answer: No hardware requirements required. For Ceilometer software, it uses the same technology (Python) as the rest of the components of the OpenStack platform. As for technology knowledge, you definitely need to understand the global architecture of OpenStack , since you need to connect a Ceilometer to every component!
Q: What are the requirements for running a ceilometer?
Answer: A simple installation requires an OpenStack engineer to work for a couple of days. The more utilization and load grows, the more you will need to improve your Ceilometer deployment. That's why some of our developers started working on the project and how.
Question: What advice would you give to people / corporations who are faced with the same tasks that you had at the beginning of the journey? .. when you have no idea about OpenStack, but you need to jump into the project ...
Answer: It definitely helps to discuss OpenStack with other people or companies. I would advise you to make friends with those who can help you, since they have already learned OpenStack. So much is happening in this ecosystem right now that it is sometimes difficult to track events and get up-to-date information or documentation. Therefore it is necessary to maintain communication
Then, I suppose, it depends on whether you are used to working on open source projects. If you have already personally participated in the free software development communities, you can simply join OpenStack, since its operation and its values ​​coincide with the values ​​of any open source project. Therefore, the same rules apply: read, learn, listen, ask (smart) questions, and then start contributing.
If you represent a company, you definitely need to bring to people the dynamics and work of open source projects to work effectively. If your developers cannot contribute to OpenStack by participating in the discussion of the features they would like to implement or embed, you will end up as a private provider with locally developed software: you will not end up with OpenStack.
Q: Who would you like to see as a Ceilometer developer?
Answer: There are many different aspects to the Ceilometer project, from data collection to the REST API, which returns data. Therefore, depending on which part someone wants to invest in, it can be a person who implements support for the Ceilometer in his “product” (for example, PaaS platform) or is engaged in data analysis and helps in creating the REST API.
Question: What features need to be improved or verified?
Answer: At this stage, we definitely need more data consumers. We already accumulate and store a lot of data, but we do not have enough feedback - how people would like to consume data, what requests they would like to perform, therefore our API is sometimes not quite convenient.
As for the tests, there is a big gap in terms of storage drivers. The very first and best supported is MongoDB, and the SQLAlchemy and HBase storage drivers will require more testing and fixes are possible.
Question: How exactly can people get started?
Answer: I think that, as with most OpenStack projects, the easiest way to get started and play with the Ceilometer is to use the devstack setting. Ceilometer is fully integrated with devstack, so it is easy to enable and deploy along with Nova, Glance, etc. Then you can experiment with the Ceilometer tool - use or contribute!
Question: Thank you very much, Julien.
Answer: Not at all!
Below we present an interview with Julien Danjou, technical manager of the OpenStack Ceilometer project.
Mirantis: Tell us about yourself.
')
Julien Dange: I’m a freelancer, a free developer, I’ve been involved in many FOSS projects, and a Debian developer for more than a decade.
Q: What is your relationship history with OpenStack? Why are you involved in the project?
Answer: I started working on the OpenStack project with eNovance, which took me to work in late 2011 to create the first European cloud platform based on OpenStack. At that moment I had no idea what OpenStack was, but working on the open source IaaS platform in Python was very exciting, so I joined. Since then, the whole OpenStack ecosystem has been created and new technical challenges arise; enough reasons to take part!
Q: What is the difference between the OpenStack project and other open source projects in which you participated?
Answer: I would name pragmatism and a good choice of technologies among the differences, which may be the main features of a successful open source project.
In addition, many of the open source projects I have participated in or are participating in now have a sufficient number of users and developers who work on the project in their free time as a hobby. In OpenStack, almost every user or developer participates in a project on the instructions of his company. This makes the project much more dynamic, it grows faster than others, and gives us the opportunity to achieve ambitious goals in almost an instant.
Q: What is your responsibility as a technical project manager for Ceilometer?
A: I watch the project and guarantee the movement in a certain direction, which we took during the last gathering of developers in Portland. I also act as a kind of gluing between the project participants, since in any case I keep under control every area of ​​the project. The technical project manager is almost full-time, given the planned volume of project implementation under this release.
Q: Can you explain the role of the Ceilometer in the OpenStack project? What is the importance of the Ceilometer tool?
Answer: Most people who build their IaaS platform want to bill for the use of platform resources. Based on this first use case, we identified the role of the Ceilometer within OpenStack as the measurement site of the OpenStack platform. Then the scope has spread to a wider collection of meters that implement many different options, from billing to triggering alarm messages.
The goal of the Ceilometer project is to calculate everything that happens in the OpenStack platform in order to bill for this or in some other way to analyze.
Question: What is unique in the project, what is the breakthrough of the Ceilometer project?
Answer: The ability to have a single point of collection and survey of measurement results in the cloud, for operators and users, with the ability to generate events and actions based on these measurements. This is what will open the possibility of creating various applications that have never been seen before.
We are also not limited to OpenStack. Almost every area of ​​Ceilometer is extensible through the plugin, so you can build your own system for collecting measurement results, publish measurements to external systems, or measure your PaaS platform directly with a Ceilometer.
Q: What has the Ceilometer community achieved at the moment?
Answer: We built the project from scratch, embedding it in every component of OpenStack without any explicit intervention. After the results had been accumulated, we entered into the process of incubation, and then came out of it as an integrated project. And all this in just one year. After only 6 months of development, OpenStack operators used the Ceilometer to measure their platforms and to bill or collect funds for their use, while simultaneously generating gigabytes of measurement data per day.
Q: What features will Ceilometer provide in the release of OpenStack Havana?
Answer: I think we are one of the projects with the largest planned volume of implementation. At Havana, our main goal is alarm reporting functionality, which allows users and operators to generate events based on an assessment of measurement results. In addition, it will become a cornerstone for the Heat project, which will provide the ability to autoscale based on this functionality of the Ceilometer and related data.
We also plan and implement new measurement capabilities, such as network bandwidth measurement in Quantum and event planning in Nova, as well as improving our public API to allow us to perform thinner queries and get more detailed statistics sections.
Question: Which vendors are the most invested and provide plugins? Who would you like to see as a Ceilometer developer?
Answer: Now we do not have external developers who distribute plug-ins for Ceilometer. What is good is that all our plugins are open source software distributed with Ceilometer. All of them are part of the base code created by the developers of Ceilometer. Nevertheless, we will be happy to see contributions to systems on other platforms, not only on OpenStack, for example Ceph.
Question: Does the Ceilometer project still have “childhood diseases” - something that needs to be changed?
Answer: No, and in fact this was one of the criteria for exiting the incubation process. You cannot go with the project to the OpenStack platform if you know that you have to redo the project from scratch. So, we have diseases, but these are mistakes of an adult.
Question: What are typical usage guidelines?
Answer: The recommended method for Ceilometer is to deploy a project with fine-tuning that matches your needs in terms of auditing, billing, and statistics. Ceilometer generates a huge amount of measurement results, so you need to make sure that you generate the amount of data that meets your needs.
Question: What do you want people to know about the project (hidden features / functionality)?
Answer: I think that there is a lot of potential in the data collected by the Ceilometer tool. People usually see data as useful for billing, but they have much more value — from capacity planning to determining usage trends for your cloud platform. You can make deployment more convenient by directing this data to the right tools.
Q: Are there any common misconceptions regarding the Ceilometer?
Answer: We had some misconceptions at the beginning of the project, when people expected Ceilometer to print PDF accounts or monitor their platform and call the system administrator in case of failure. Now it's pretty clear that we are a warehouse of measurement results of OpenStack and you can use it to build any application on top of it, including billing or active monitoring. But we do not aim to provide this functionality.
Question: What are the prerequisites?
Answer: No hardware requirements required. For Ceilometer software, it uses the same technology (Python) as the rest of the components of the OpenStack platform. As for technology knowledge, you definitely need to understand the global architecture of OpenStack , since you need to connect a Ceilometer to every component!
Q: What are the requirements for running a ceilometer?
Answer: A simple installation requires an OpenStack engineer to work for a couple of days. The more utilization and load grows, the more you will need to improve your Ceilometer deployment. That's why some of our developers started working on the project and how.
Question: What advice would you give to people / corporations who are faced with the same tasks that you had at the beginning of the journey? .. when you have no idea about OpenStack, but you need to jump into the project ...
Answer: It definitely helps to discuss OpenStack with other people or companies. I would advise you to make friends with those who can help you, since they have already learned OpenStack. So much is happening in this ecosystem right now that it is sometimes difficult to track events and get up-to-date information or documentation. Therefore it is necessary to maintain communication
Then, I suppose, it depends on whether you are used to working on open source projects. If you have already personally participated in the free software development communities, you can simply join OpenStack, since its operation and its values ​​coincide with the values ​​of any open source project. Therefore, the same rules apply: read, learn, listen, ask (smart) questions, and then start contributing.
If you represent a company, you definitely need to bring to people the dynamics and work of open source projects to work effectively. If your developers cannot contribute to OpenStack by participating in the discussion of the features they would like to implement or embed, you will end up as a private provider with locally developed software: you will not end up with OpenStack.
Q: Who would you like to see as a Ceilometer developer?
Answer: There are many different aspects to the Ceilometer project, from data collection to the REST API, which returns data. Therefore, depending on which part someone wants to invest in, it can be a person who implements support for the Ceilometer in his “product” (for example, PaaS platform) or is engaged in data analysis and helps in creating the REST API.
Question: What features need to be improved or verified?
Answer: At this stage, we definitely need more data consumers. We already accumulate and store a lot of data, but we do not have enough feedback - how people would like to consume data, what requests they would like to perform, therefore our API is sometimes not quite convenient.
As for the tests, there is a big gap in terms of storage drivers. The very first and best supported is MongoDB, and the SQLAlchemy and HBase storage drivers will require more testing and fixes are possible.
Question: How exactly can people get started?
Answer: I think that, as with most OpenStack projects, the easiest way to get started and play with the Ceilometer is to use the devstack setting. Ceilometer is fully integrated with devstack, so it is easy to enable and deploy along with Nova, Glance, etc. Then you can experiment with the Ceilometer tool - use or contribute!
Question: Thank you very much, Julien.
Answer: Not at all!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/189502/
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