Hacker News Reader

Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be squarely aimed at Gerrit fans, which is difficult for me to wrap my head around. The projects I'm on which are Gerrit-encumbered all seem to regard it as a necessary evil rather than a selling point. Still, the project is well-thought-out and I hope it's successful!

View on HN

From what I've seen, it's more like "what patterns you should follow if you want to do a lot of collaboration with openstack upstream."

OpenStack uses opendev, so anyone who wants to contribute upstream to openstack will need to know about the opendev ecosystem, possibly by dogfooding tools like Gerrit and Zuul in their own infrastructure.

I don't think openstack will go away any time soon, and I don't think they'll stop using Gerrit etc any time soon, so everyone else in their vicinity also remains encumbered with tooling that sometimes feels legacy or over-complicated :)

Personally, I don't mind gerrit as a code submitter and code reviewer. The workflow feels pretty straightforward to me. Some aspects of Gerrit administration are annoying though. It also seems a bit encumbered by being written in java; this flows on to annoyances like not supporting FIDO2 keys yet, and probably not in the near or medium future either (correct me if I'm wrong).

There's an interesting thing about complicated tools: they often exist to serve complicated requirements.

OpenStack is a large, complex piece of infrastructure software used at scale that many people, even on HN, will never experience directly. Why don't you hear about us much? Because people running at that scale frequently don't enjoy talking about the details of their infrastructure.

Ask the question next time you see something in a software tool, e.g. gerrit, that seems over-complicated: What can this software do because of this complication that I'm missing?

I don't think the tooling we use is what everyone should use, by any stretch, but don't assume things are being done in an antiquated way just because they're different than you're previous experiences or because they've been done that way for a long time.

Of course, I wasn't claiming that openstack is doing anything wrong. As someone who uses openstack every day and has contributed (a little) code upstream, it is all straightforward enough for me. One of the reasons we use gerrit in-house is that we like to maintain close ties with upstream, and a couple of our tech leads are core upstream developers/maintainers. I only don't want to name them because I prefer to keep my hackernews identity fairly anonymous :)

My intention was to reply to the commenter who assumed that opendev only exists for gerrit fans, and it seemed like they were missing out on a bigger picture about what it exists for.

> OpenStack is a large, complex piece of infrastructure software used at scale that many people, even on HN, will never experience directly

IME, openstack is being chopped up and the good parts are moving into Kubernetes. I don't think "openstack" will be a thing in the future, you'll just be using bits and pieces of it. There may come a ship of theseus moment where suddenly openstack is Kubernetes and no one notices

I was originally not going to respond to this, as I don't think this was written in a tone to encourage good discourse; however I wrote something on one of my socials on Friday which is relevant, which I'll paraphrase here.

It's been an extremely long time since I've seen an extreme scale Kubernetes environment which didn't have some OpenStack components, and it's been a long time since I've seen an OpenStack installation which didn't include (at least one) Kubernetes cluster.

And even if this wasn't true... would it matter? We're all working towards a vision of open infrastructure, trying to serve the infrastructure needs of developers who are counting on us. Why do we have to be so tribal about it? It doesn't matter if you're using OpenStack or Kubernetes to automate your infrastructure; it matters that your infrastructure is automated and that you automated it with open source software.

In the end, it's all better when we cooperate. That's happening all over the place! Metal3.io is bringing the power of OpenStack Ironic to an API design more familiar to the CNCF/K8s community. The OpenStack Magnum community continues to make installing Kubernetes clusters on top of OpenStack easier.

Tribalism is just another form of taking your eye off the ball. Open infrastructure is winning; we can't lose focus now!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com