We held a two-day mini-sprint in Boston at the end of January to update the OpenStack Operations Guide. You may remember the first five-day sprint was in Austin in February 2013. This time, the sprint was shorter with fewer people in Boston and a few remote, but we had quite specific goals:
- Update from Folsom to Havana (about a year’s worth of OpenStack features)
- Roadmap discussion about nova-network and neutron, the two software-defined networking solutions implemented for OpenStack
- Add upgrade instructions from grizzly to havana
- Implement and test the use of parts to encapsulate chapters
- Address editor comments from our developmental editor at O’Reilly
- Add a reference architecture using RedHat Enterprise Linux and neutron for networking
Some quick wins for adding content were:
- Custom flavors and host aggregates paired with custom flavors for special use cases
- Image sharing between tenants using glance member-add
We added and updated content like mad during the two days:
- A fun story about Havana being haunted by the dead
- Customizing chapter gets a complete refresh
The two toughest updates are still in progress, and our deadline for handover to O’Reilly is this Wednesday. The first tough nut to crack was getting agreement on adding an example architecture for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are nearly there, just a few more fixes to go, at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/69816/. The second is testing the upgrade process from grizzly to havana on both Ubuntu and RedHat Enterprise Linux. That’s still in progress at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/68936/.
The next steps for the O’Reilly edition are proofreading, copyediting, and indexing over the next six weeks or so. I’ll be keeping the O’Reilly edition in synch with our community-edited guide. As always, anyone in the OpenStack community can contribute to the Operations Guide using the steps on our wiki page. This guide follows the O’Reilly style guide rather than our established OpenStack documentation conventions. I’m looking forward to a great future for this guide and we’re all pretty happy with the results of the second mini-sprint.
Thanks to everyone making this a priority! Our host at MIT was Jon Proulx joined by Everett Toews who braved airport layovers and snow, and Tom Fifield who wrote the most patches despite a complete lack of sleep. Joe Topjian worked on edits for months leading up and has been tireless in making sure our integrity and truth lives on through this guide. Thanks too to the the hard working developmental editor at O’Reilly who offered lunch in Boston, Brian Anderson, joined by Andy Oram. David Cramer got DocBook parts working for us in time for the sprint. Summer Long worked long and hard on the example architecture for RedHat. Our remote reviewers Matt Kassawara, Andreas Jaeger, and Steve Gordon were so valuable during the process and ongoing. Shilla Saebi gave some nice copyediting this past week. What an effort!