[ovirt-devel] oVirt Node roadmap

[Fabian Deutsch]

Hey,

in the last few months the Node team spent a lot of efforts in
stabilizing Node by closing tons of bugs, rebasing Node onto CentOS
7.2, and in addition adding features like Hosted-Engine - to get Node
in shape for the recently released oVirt 3.6.0.

But we were also seeing how Node is showing it's age. It becomes more
and more challenging to solve bugs and implement features in Node's
current architecture.
To address these problems, and let Node adjust better to new changes,
a few months ago we started to look at how we can change Node, to make
it easier to develop, test, and use.

This comparison [1] shows a brief summary of our investigations. We
especially looked at Atomic and containers [2].
At the bottom line both of them provided us an architecture which
would help us to achieve something like 70% of what we need. But
during early trials we quickly ran into issues which we experience in
similar ways with today's Node.

Finally we settled an approach - the idea was around since right from
the beginning - which aligns very well with existing technologies
which we already use in the oVirt and Fedora/CentOS scope.

The new Node will be using anaconda for installation, LVM for upgrades
and rollbacks, and Cockpit [3] for administration. The future design
is taking care that packages don't need to take special care to work
on Node - which was a major obstacle in the past. Node will rather
behave (mostly) like a regular host - but with the advantages of an
easy & ready to use image, image based delivery and a robust rollback.
The current design principles and links to some additional resources
are in the wiki [4].

Stay tuned, we are just getting started.

On behalf of the Node Team
fabian

--
[1] http://www.ovirt.org/Node/Specs#Comparison:_Possible_Implementations
[2] http://www.projectatomic.io/ ~ http://docker.com/
[3] http://cockpit-project.org/
[4] http://www.ovirt.org/Node/4.0