This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of interviews with OpenStack engineers about what they worked on in the Mitaka cycle.

The OpenStack cloud software project recently released the Mitaka release. RDO is a community distribution of OpenStack. I’ve invited several of the engineers that work on RDO to talk about what they did in the Mitaka cycle.

If the above player doesn’t appear, or doesn’t work for you, you can listen here.

Rich: Mitaka is ready now, and before we move on to Newton, we should celebrate what we’ve done in Mitaka. I’m speaking with Ivan Chavero. I understand that you worked primarily on packstack. I’ve had to correct a number of people over the last few months who think that packstack is abandoned, and we’re not doing it any more. While, at the same time, the people at CERN use packstack for a lot of things. and I know that they’re an unusual case, but there are other people that are using it.

Tell us what you did in the Mitaka cycle.

Ivan: Well, we fixed a lot of bugs. We had a lot of problems because there was some migration from Keystone version 2 to Keystone version 3. We added some other components like, Ceilometer was split into aodh and Gnocci, and we added that stuff.

I think it’s pretty stable right now.

We added more features to Neutron. Everything we have to … the new stuff, we have to test. We add it to Packstack.

I wanted to add Magnum, but it wasn’t a priority. And there’s other stuff like Ceph that we wanted to add, but it was just like, let’s fix bugs, let’s fix the stuff we need, and keep Packstack stable.

We did a lot of bug fixes for Packstack being able to work properly with the CI infrastructure. Pretty much fixing a lot of bugs that we found on the road.

R: Some of those other things that you mentioned - Magnum and Ceph and so on, are those going to be goals for the Newton cycle, then?

I: Well, I want them to be goals, but I have to discuss it with the community.

R: Who else in the community is working on Packstack?

I: There’s a lot of people. In this cycle we had a lot of contributions from outside the RDO community, which was very positive. Javier Peña is working on that. David Simard is working on that from the CI part, a lot of stuff. Alan Pevec is our guiding light. And Martin Mágr, who is the current PTL - he’s stepping down but right now he’s the PTL. A lot of people that are always asking stuff about Packstack and doing reviews, and actually submitting patches.

You know, I think that people think that Packstack is dead because it’s not recommended for production use. Only if you really know what you’re doing, you should use it in production, but it’s not recommended. TripleO is the recommended stuff for production, and Packstack is for doing the experiments, and proof-of-concept stuff.

But I use it on my home OpenStack deployment, and I do a lot of experiments. It’s pretty good for experimenting, because it’s pretty lightweight, and it’s very easy to modify.

R: Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to what’s coming in Newton!

I: Thank you!