OpenStack Summit Tokyo

Plugins

The first work session for Horizon started on Wednesday with plugins. Previously, there has been a session presenting a way to provide plugins. It looks nearly finished, all it really needs, is documentation. The discussion mostly focused on issues for distributors; currently, policy checks only work, if plugins were added by addition to local_settings.py; unfortunately, that is not an option for distributors. The discussion then went to changing configuration to .ini files. The issue with it is, configuration schema in horizon is pretty complex, and that won't change with the proposed approach. OpenStack distributors can't allow automated changes to configuration files.

Most important piece for the rest of the session was, we agreed on moving content out of Horizon core, such as

• Sahara
• Trove
• Heat
• Ceilometer

Metering support in Horizon has been quite unusable, as it takes very long to search or aggregate collected data. The other contents were pretty much blocked in the past, because they require significant installations and configurations. Horizon cores were unable to provide constant reviews on content esp. for Trove and Sahara.

Existential Crisis, AngularJS or not to AngularJS

The AngularJS kind of stalled during Liberty development cycle. In total, about 300 patches have landed; it has been the observation, the new Angular pages are slower than traditional Django pages. One reason for this seems to be, all JavasScript is loaded on each page load, no matter if the code is really required or not. One answer to this was to move to a single page application as soon as possible. Another issue is, docs or a more complete example is still missing. Functional tests are run on existing panels, Angular panels are ignored.

How to make meaningful progress with AngularJS

This session could be seen as continuation of previous session. Final outcome was, we'll focus on 2-3 panels in AngularJS; new panels should be proposed with DISABLED = True setting. New launch instance workflow is still not enabled by default, currently there are 5 patches up for review fixing bugs. The priority should lie on fixing issues and stabilizing existing panels before pushing more Angular-based panels to Horizon.

Horizon and async features

Horizon does not use any message bus; for updates on asynchronous operations a pulling mechanism is used. In this scope, an asynchronous operation is any longer running operation, like launching an instance, create a volume etc. The underlying API returns immediately without returning the actual status of the operation, just something like "operation scheduled". One idea to solve this, is to utilize zaqar as a message bus.

Setting Mitaka priorities and non-priorities

Finally, we decided on priorities for Mitaka cycle. Most important areas to work on will be

• Plugins, documentation is missing
• Angular content
  • Users panel
  • Images panel
• Theming, documentation is missing
• Dependencies, currently pbr is blocking to release XStatic packages
• Performance

The linked etherpad page will be used during Mitaka development cycle to coordinate the work, like we used an etherpad over Liberty cycle.