OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

In Paris, the OpenStack SDK was starting to take shape and we offered a look into why it's being created and how it's being done, including a few small examples. Now we're able to build real applications on it and see the advantage first hand of bringing a better user experience to developers building software with OpenStack.

Rather than building an application on top of numerous different client libraries, all of which work in different ways, developers can use one set of libraries from one package, all with a consistent interface.

This presentation introduces some of the ideas behind the project, examples of tools built on this new SDK, as well as how to add features and support for other services. We'll also cover the direction the project is heading.

1. The Back Story (5 min)

The project started to solve a few issues a number of people had seen around the community. For one, the plethora of dependencies a user needs to manage in order to work with the many pieces of OpenStack leads to an unfavorable experience. There's a lot of moving parts with a lot of versions. On top of this, they all do similar tasks in very different ways. Beyond that, finding out how to use the available tools requires looking in different places for different amounts of documentation, leading to fractured experience on top of fractured experience. The project aims to bring application developer interactions into one unified location, providing consistent interfaces and full documentation and examples, leading to one place to go for building applications that work with OpenStack

2. Example Applications (15 min)

We currently have a few sample applications - one which works with Swift to backup directories, and another which combines Nova and Neuton to create Jenkins build servers - and over the coming month are going to be building more tools like this as a showcase of the services we have provided. This section of the talk will be quickly talking about what the tools do, but focusing on how the libraries within the SDK enable these services as compared to how they would have to be done today given previously existing tools.

3. Building the Future (15 min)

Our developer documentation is written with a focus on enabling anyone to contribute, but we'll plan to do a quick walkthrough of the necessary parts to build out support for any OpenStack service. We want developers to feel like they can put their service in here instead of continuing the status quo of everyone doing their own different thing. We'll also walk through the state and direction of the project and our plans to continue improving the user experience landscape across OpenStack.

4. Questions (5 min)

 

Relevant Links:

Git repository: https://github.com/stackforge/python-openstacksdk

Bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-openstacksdk

Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/SDK-Development/PythonOpenStackSDK