January 2016 – Red Hat Stack

Earlier this week, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Private Cloud Software Suites, Q1 2016 report.

The Forrester report states that Red Hat “leads the evaluation with its powerful portal, top governance capabilities, and a strategy built around integration, open source, and interoperability. Rather than trying to build a custom approach for completing functions around operations, governance, or automation, Red Hat provides a very composable package by leveraging a mix of market standards and open source in addition to its own development.”

Moreover: “Red Hat received top marks for workflow life-cycle automation, administrative portal usability and experience, permissions, compliance tracking, capacity monitoring, platform APIs, ITSM and developer tools, and configuration management tool integration.”

Continue reading “Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Cited as a Leader Among Private Cloud Software Suites by Independent Research Firm”

During the OpenStack summit of May 2015 in Vancouver, the OpenStack Telemetry community team ran a session for operators to provide feedback. One of the main issues operators relayed was the polling that Ceilometer was running on Nova to gather instance information. It had a highly negative impact on the Nova API CPU usage, as it retrieves all the information about instances on regular intervals.

Indeed, it turns out that Nova is not optimizing the retrieval of these bits of information (a few rows in a database), and does not utilize a cache. Fortunately, Nova does provide a way to poll more efficiently with the Changes-Since request parameter.

As a result of this discovery, the Telemetry team built a blueprint named “resource-metadata-caching”, targeting the implementation of a local in-memory cache in Ceilometer, and the use of the Changes-Since parameter. This blueprint has been completed by Jason Myers during the Liberty development cycle and is therefore part of the final version of Ceilometer released for the Liberty cycle.

Continue reading “Ceilometer Polling Performance Improvement”