[Most of this originally appeared in a thread on the openstack-dev mailing list but seemed interesting enough to repost here.] It is TC election season again in OpenStack-land and this time around a few days gap has been included between the self-nomination period and the actual election for those standing for election to be quizzed on various topics. One of these questions[0] was the usual "what is OpenStack?" between One Big Thing and Loosely Familiar Many Things. I started with a smart-alec response to ttx's comparison of OpenStack to Lego (which I still own more of than I care to

or How I Learned to Love the Lack of Environment Variables Previously I posted a preview of my favorite new feature of OpenStackClient, support for cloud configuration files and the new --os-cloud global option. Who knew it would take six months to get it done and released? There is some merely adequate documentation of the Client Cloud Configuration (or CCC) operation in the OSC Configuration docs, but this is too good to leave to official docs alone. CCC was actually introduced in OSC release 1.1.0, which is the basis for compatibility with Liberty dependency requirements. But like the rest of

I was looking forward to writing a bit about OpenStackClient becoming the first project added to OpenStack under the 'big yurt' [1] governance model. It was even mostly written and set to publish right after the QA Code sprint article when Nebula did what so many startups do, which is to abruptly cease to exist. On April 1 no less. So instead I'll rehash this as a note on OSC's third birthday, based on the first repo commit. Looking Backward I don't want to spend too much energy looking at where we have been, except to note that a lot

Last week (Mar 25-27) a handful of OpenStack QA Team members gathered at HP's Chelsea office to Get Some Code Written and Merged. We had a small list of priorities and some amazement at the amount of stuff the morning caterer could fit into a single box. [Note to self: get a magic catering box to store oversized project todo list] I was focused primarily on DevStack although some discussion took place around some future direction on Grenade plugins (see below). Much actual work was accomplished by others present in spite of Matt's attempts to feed us into submission. Dang,

OpenStackClient has had plugin support for a while now and it is being used by real-world OpenStack project clients such as Congress. I've also been using it as an entry point (ha!) for some of my experimental command setups, and so can you. osc-debug I've spent a lot of time debugging OSC lately in preparation for my favorite new feature yet-to-come, support for the new --os-cloud option that takes advantage of os-client-config's cloud configuration file abilities. Much of this debugging is necessarily around authentication and it became obvious to me that a built-in way to see what OSC was using