One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
This was the first impression when I arrived at the new plusserver office, which is located at the ECOS Co-Workingspace in Bielefeld, for the CloudMon Mini-Hackathon last thursday. Aside from now being assured that Bielefeld really does exists (haha ;) - I had a blast.
Ralf (Architect SCS & Open Source at plusserver) and I had the idea for the hackathon a while back in order to get people working on the new version of CloudMon together. The complete squad working on the pluscloud open as well as Artem from Open Telekom Cloud (who is the author of CloudMon) came to Bielefeld to spend a day getting their hands wet on CloudMon. Ralf managed to get everyone to Bielefeld in person. In times of a lot of remote meetings this was fantastic, since it does help to collaborate remotely if people have met in real before. Furthermore it was nice to actually work on a physical flipchart and discuss the architecture of CloudMon. Thanks from my side to everyone who did not fear the traintravel to Bielefeld!
CloudMon, for SCS the designated successor for the OpenStack Health Monitor, has been the primary subject of a few of our Open Hacking Sessions, which typically take place friday afternoon) but so far, we did not manage to gain major velocity. With the Mini-Hackathon Ralf and I wanted to lay the groundwork in order to give our efforts more traction.
What does CloudMon do? CloudMon is a set of components that allow to run ansible-based playbooks that will run various commands via the OpenStack SDk and thus via the API of an OpenStack-based cloud to test the functionality and note the behaviour of the cloud.
The biggest hurdle so far is, that bootstrapping CloudMon for a new environment is not documented - this will be the first large contribution from outside the Open Telekom Cloud, since having a good documentation on how to bootstrap CloudMon will help so that others can contribute more easily to the further development. So far CloudMon is living in the namespace of the OTC. Artem’s idea is to lift the development of CloudMon into a more independent place - so that the various communities can contribute more easily.
The effort around CloudMon takes places within the Special Interest Group (SIG) Monitoring at SCS. If you want to find out more about what the SIG Monitoring has been working on I recommend the article on Observability in OpenStack that was published in the german Linux Magazine recently. The SIG Monitoring is one of those really good examples around the SCS community where collaboration is really lived and not just spoken about.
