Continuing my series of interviews with RDO engineers, here’s my chat with Emilien Macchi, who I talked with at OpenStack Summit last week in Austin.

If you’d like to talk about what you did in Mitaka, please contact me at rbowen@redhat.com.

(If the above player doesn’t work for you, please download the audio HERE.

Rich: I’m speaking with Emilien Macchi, who is one of the people that worked on the Mitaka release of OpenStack. Thank you for taking time to speak with me.

Emilien: Thank you for welcoming me.

R: What did you do in Mitaka?

E: In Mitaka, most of my tasks were related to packaging testing. I’m currently leading the Puppet OpenStack group, which is a team where we develop some Puppet modules that deploy OpenStack in production. Red Hat is using the Puppet modules in TripleO, so we can automate the deployment of OpenStack services. Recently we switched the gates of OpenStack Infra to use RDO packaging. We had a lot of issued before because we didn’t have much CI. But since Mitaka, the RDO and the Puppet teams worked a lot together to make sure that we can provide some testing together. We can fix things very early when it’s broken upstream. Like when we have a new dependency or when we have a change in the requirements. That was this kind of test where you provide very early feedback to the RDO people that are doing the packaging. It was very interesting to work with RDO.

We provided early feedback on the builds, on the failures. We also contributed to … I say “we”, I don’t like to say “I” … we, my group, my Puppet group, we contributed to the new packages that we have in Mitaka. We updated the spec in the package so we could have more features, and more services in the RDO projects.

Testing! Testing every day. Testing, testing, testing. Participating in the events that the RDO community is having, like the weekly meetings, the testing days. It was very interesting for us to have this relationship with the RDO team.

So I’m looking forward to Newton.

R: What do you anticipate you’ll be working on in Newton?

E: Well, that’s an interesting question. We are talking about this week. [At OpenStack Summit, Austin.]

The challenge for us … the biggest challenge, I guess, is to follow the release velocity of upstream projects. We have a bunch of projects in OpenStack, and it’s very hard to catch up with all of the projects at the same time. In the meantime we have to because those projects, they are in the RDO project and also in the products, so that’s something we need to … we need to scale the way that we producing all this work.

Something we are very focused on right now is to use the Software Factory project, which is how OpenStack Infra is operating to build OpenStack software. This is a project - an open source project - which is now used by RDO. We can have this same way as upstream, but for downstream - we can have the same way to produce the RDO artifacts, like the packages and the Puppet modules, and so on. That’s the next big challenge, is to be fully integrated with Software Factory, to implement the missing features we will need to make the testing better.

Yeah, that’s the biggest challenge: Improve the testing, and stopping doing manual things, automate all the things, that is the next challenge.

R: Thank you very much. Thanks for your time.

E: Thank you for your time.