OpenStack Mitaka Design Summit

Starting in the Kilo cycle OpenStack underwent a change in governance model where the scope of what we call OpenStack has been redefined. The new model is called the "Big Tent", and is much less exclusionary. Prior to this the QA program had a policy of directly supporting any project that was part of OpenStack, meaning tests in tempest, support in devstack for running them, etc. However in a model where there are far more projects considered part of OpenStack it becomes infeasible to directly support all of them. Even before the "Big Tent" was adopted, we realized that this centralized approach did not scale well with the growing number of OpenStack projects. With the "Big Tent" opening up the doors to more projects, the scale issue has become even more compelling. 

As a result of this change in governance model, we have worked on moving QA in OpenStack to a self-service model, where each new project in OpenStack is responsible for writing and maintaining their deployment scripts and tests, as plugins to the tools for deployment and testing frameworks maintained by the QA team.This will allow both the upstream QA efforts to scale organically with the rest of the OpenStack ecosystem but also allow new projects to control their own testing and deployment stories for gating, which can increase development velocity for newer projects.

This talk will cover the work which was done to add external plugin interfaces to Tempest, Devstack, and grenade as well as go into examples on how to use each project's respective interface. It will also show examples where these plugin interfaces are being leveraged today.