[Starlingx-discuss] User feedback and questions

[Waines, Greg]

See in-lined comments/responses below,
Greg.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ildiko Vancsa <ildiko at openinfra.dev>
Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2023 6:06 PM
To: StarlingX ML <starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io>
Subject: [Starlingx-discuss] User feedback and questions

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Hi StarlingX Community,

I’m reaching out to share some information with you from a call I had with a potential new user.

* Industry area, use cases and requirements
  - The company is in the telecom industry, the person I talked to has been in the area of research
  - StarlingX use cases
    + Primarily private wireless and 5G core
    + Later on potential use cases might include AI, healthcare and more
  - They are currently prioritizing containerized workloads and later on will be looking into deploying OpenStack as well

* Evaluation status
  - Early stages, they deployed StarlingX, both simplex and duplex, in virtual environments
  - Looking into bare metal deployment as well

* Feedback and questions so far
  - As they have been looking into the platform, they didn’t seem to be able to find the level of multi-tenancy that they needed
    + Does the platform support multiple tenants within one Kubernetes cluster and one StarlingX instance? Is there any documentation that describes the available tenant and user configurations within StarlingX?
[Greg]
In the context of StarlingX infrastructure management, there is absolutely no multiple tenant support.
There is one, and only one, tenant that manages the hosts and the services that make up the StarlingX Bare Metal Infrastructure Management.

In the context of the StarlingX Kubernetes cluster, … sort of, but nothing more than vanilla K8S gives you …
•       there is some documentation on how you can manage non-admin type k8s users, and groups of k8s users, in different namespaces, with restricted RBAC, restricted security policies and restricted resource management, etc.  ( https://docs.starlingx.io/security/kubernetes/index-security-kub-81153c1254c3.html#manage-non-admin-type-users )
o       … all using common K8S mechanisms
•       … sort of a very soft multi-tenancy
•       … but we have not done anything else
o       areas that we would LIKE to look into for kubernetes multi-tenancy is to basically look at the projects under the Kubernetes Working Group for Multi-Tenancy ( https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/multi-tenancy/   ), e.g.
•       Benchmarks: a set of benchmarks (i.e., compliance tests) to determine if your clusters are well-configured for multitenancy.
•       Hierararchical namespaces (aka HNC): allows namespaces to own each other, policy propagation between related namespaces, and delegated namespace creation.
•       Virtual clusters: run multiple virtualized cluster on a single underlying cluster, allowing for hard(er) multitenancy.

  - The networking setup has been hard to figure out for StarlingX, they found that it's not very well documented.
    + Is it in the roadmap to document the networking setup for StarlingX with more details?
    + Would it be possible to automate the creation of networks for the platform? Especially for the virtual deployment option, since that is most commonly deployed by new users, who are evaluating the platform.
[Greg]
Would be interesting to have a discussion with them to understand their difficulty in understanding the platform networks.
I.e. I’m assuming it is the ‘platform’ networks that they are having trouble understanding … i.e. https://docs.starlingx.io/_images/starlingx-deployment-options-controller-storage.png

  - They had an intern who was working on deploying the platform and has been using the community’s communication channels, including IRC. The intern had a hard time getting responses to their questions, which made it harder to figure out how to overcome the deployment challenges.


Best Regards,
Ildikó

———

Ildikó Váncsa
Director of Community
Open Infrastructure Foundation






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