[Starlingx-discuss] Challenges with the support to deploy stx-openstack in 7.0

[Ildiko Vancsa]

Hi StarlingX TSC and Community,

I’m reaching out to you about one of the topics that came up during the Release Team meeting[1] earlier today, which is the replacement of Armada with FluxCD. The conversation got me a little confused and I would like to follow up on a few questions and concerns.

Background: According to the current state of the 7.0 release the work item is in a stage where it is operational and the feature is marked ‘Done’ in the release spreadsheet. At the same time, it does not support the deployment of OpenStack as part of StarlingX. I found this surprising, as my expectation was that the goal and expected outcome of the feature implementation was to provide the same functionality as Armada did.

The spec[2] also lists the following work items:
* Update the application framework to use the Helm/Source controllers
* Update all applications to use the Helm/Source controllers for deploying/updating applications
* Provide upgrade support to update all applications to the Helm Controller and remove the Armada pod

Questions and concerns: My understanding was that ‘application’ refers to OpenStack among other components. Is that a false assumption?

While it can happen that a bigger work item gets released with partial functionality, it was raised during the call today that StarlingX 7.0 might get released without the support to deploy OpenStack potentially due to issues with the now deprecated Armada component. Is my understanding correct that it is a possible scenario for StarlingX 7.0?

If the above scenario happened, it would result in a very visible user-facing change which can provide issues to existing users or shrink the pool of potential new ones. While OpenStack is utilizing the advantages of being deployed in containers, it is still a dominant feature of StarlingX to provide infrastructure functionality. In that sense, I think there are concerns that would be worthwhile to evaluate to decide if it is a blocking issue to not being able to deploy it within StarlingX in the 7.0 release. What are your thoughts about this? Have the impacts of the above mentioned scenario been evaluated already?

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó

[1] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/stx-releases
[2] https://review.opendev.org/c/starlingx/specs/+/829595

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Ildikó Váncsa
Senior Manager, Community & Ecosystem
Open Infrastructure Foundation