Last week was the OpenStack Design Summit in Portland, OR where we, developers, discussed and designed the new OpenStack release (Havana) coming up.

The summit has been wonderful. It was my first OpenStack design summit -- even more as a PTL -- and bumping into various people I've never met so far and worked with online only was a real pleasure!

Nick Barcet from eNovance, our dear previous Ceilometer PTL, and myself, talked about Ceilometer and presented the work that has been done for Grizzly, with some previews of what we'll like to see done for its Havana release.

Design sessions

Ceilometer had his design sessions during the last days of the summit. We noted a lot of things and commented during the sessions in our Etherpads instances.

The first session was a description of Ceilometer core architecture for interested people, and was a wonderful success considering that the room was packed. Our Doug Hellmann did a wonderful job introducing people to Ceilometer and answering question.

The next session was about getting feedbacks from our users. We had a lot of surprise to discover wonderful real use-cases and deployments, like the CERN using Ceilometer and generating 2 GB of data per day!

The following sessions ran on Thursday and were much more about new features discussion. A lot ot already existing blueprints were discussed and quickly validated during the first morning session. Then, Sandy Walsh introduced the architecture they use inside StackTach, so we can start thinking about getting things from it into Ceilometer.

API improvements were discussed without surprises and with a good consensus on what needs to be done. The four following sessions that occupied a lot of the days were related to alarming. All were lead by Eoghan Glynn, from Red Hat, who did an amazing job presenting the possible architectures with theirs pros and cons. Actually, all we had to do was to nod to his designs and acknowledge the plan on how to build this.

That last two sessions were about discussing advanced models for billing where we got some interesting feedback from Daniel Dyer from HP, and then were a quick follow-up of the StackTach presentation from the morning session.

Havana roadmap

The list of blueprints targeting Havana is available and should be finished by next week. If you want to propose blueprints, you're free to do so and inform us about it so we can validate it. The same applies if you wish to implement one of them!

API extension

I do think the API version 2 is going to be heavily extended during this release cycle. We need more feature, like the group-by
functionality.

Healthnmon

In parallel of the design sessions, discussions took place in the unconference room with the Healthnmon developers to figure out a plan in order to merge some of their efforts into Ceilometer. They should provide a component to help Ceilometer supports more hypervisors than it currently does.

Alarming

Alarming is definitely going to be the next big project for Ceilometer. Today, Eoghan and I started building blueprints on alarming, centralised in a general blueprint.

We know this is going to happen for real and very soon, thanks to the engagements of eNovance and Red Hat who are committing resources to this amazing project!