OpenStack – Where we’re going, and why

I didn’t sleep much on Sunday night. By the time I headed for bed, the news was out, and the twittubes were flooded.

Desperate to get sleep, but I’m terrified to wake up to 1,000 new bug reports. It’s like streaking the quad, but with code. #openstack @jmckenty

There was a video up from an interview I had given the week before.

There were over 100 developers camped out in the #openstack channel, asking probing questions. Most of them were politely worded versions of: “What the hell were you thinking?”

Patches started coming in. Then a New York Times blog post. More bug reports. More patches. More press.

Original Nebula Logo

I’d love to say that we shared a moment of solidarity as a team, toasted ourselves, and wrote more code. But truthfully, half of the NASA Nebula team were on a red-eye flight to DC, to run another set of training workshops for new Nebula users. Some were holed up with the legal teams, trying to figure out how to take the Nova example (brute-force software release) and use it to reshape NASA’s open source software release policy. Vish was bravely manning IRC, answering the flood of questions.

And in a classic case of nostalgia, I started thinking back over the crazy history of this “thing” that has had more names, than developers.

The code name of the “compute” component in Open Stack is called “Nova”. While, if you had the appropriate access to NASA internal systems, you could find early references to the “Novae” task in Nebula development (which was originally the PXE and Puppet-based configuration management system we used for deploying Nebula to physical hardware), the earliest public record of nova is this:

“NASA Nebula Bonding Lunch – We Are the Nova”

Which is possibly one of the worst photos of me on the internet. C’est la via.

While in Austin, Texas last week, at the first Open Stack Developer’s Summit, I had an opportunity to give a brief presentation about NASA Nebula – why we were in the Cloud business, some of the history that led us to this point, etc. While I never prepare slide decks to be standalone (I prefer to use them as audio-visual aids to the substance of the event, which is obviously paying attention to me), you can have a look at the whole thing:

It was based, loosely, on an internal memo I sent a while back to some members of the Nebula team (excerpts below):

There are, literally, a ton of people on the Nebula team now. Which is awesome. But it also mean there are dozens of you that I’ve never had a chance to interact with personally, who may have missed a lot of our early (ancient) discussions about WHY we’re all working so damn hard.

It’s not about the money.

Which is to say, Nebula is not, primarily, about cost recovery. It’s not (mostly) about saving money, for missions, projects, or the Agency at large.

And on the flip side, we’re not DOING this just because it’s our job. Nebula is not the place for “work to rule” – if you don’t wake up every morning with a burning desire to get to your keyboard and roll the Nebula ball forward, then there are honestly better places and projects for you to be working on.

It’s not about being on the “cutting edge“.

We get a ton of press on Nebula, most of it excited over how innovative NASAhas become, how we’re embracing new technologies, how we’re leading the government forward. And all of that is great – but that’s not why we’re doing it. This is not innovation, for the sake of innovation.

It’s about the Science.

I haven’t really been at NASA long enough to have a good grasp of its long and illustrious history. So in the same fashion that I get away with practicing Computer Science without having formally studied it, I have to work from first principles. In this case, the first principles are a happy little document titled, the “Space Act” (Specifically the Declaration of Policy and Purpose, section 102):

Sec. 102.  (a) The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.

(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;

(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment;

So I’d just like to point out that the mission statement of the Agency, includes specifically section 102(d)(8) – is to cooperate with other agencies in order to make effective utilization of scientific and engineering resources. AKA… Cloud Computing.

Open Source, by which I mean participation in an open source process, as well as the release of source code under an open license, is an activity NASA can partake of under section 102(a). It is way more meaningful than most of the rest of what we’re doing.