Health of OpenEBS #905
Comments
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cc @xing-yang @quinton-hoole @chira001 (as TAG Storage Chairs) |
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Here at Civo we're using the mayastor driver pretty extensively. We've been heavily involved in the testing and proving the scalability of the driver and are looking forward the 2.0 release that's predicted for early September. Talking to the team at DataCore, they are committed to the project at the moment and keeping it OpenSource and available for the community to use. The OpenSource side of OpenEBS did play a part in us choosing to use the software. |
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@DMajrekar can you please tag the folks in DataCore here on this issue? (so we can hear from them?) thanks! |
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@DMajrekar - we're listening! ... and will be replying shortly. I'd rather give you a coherent picture than a set of piecemeal responses. |
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Hi @dims – yes, OpenEBS is still very much alive and kicking! DataCore is fully committed to the ongoing development of OpenEBS and is applying its know-how and expertise to enrich the project with a full range of data services as well as investing in growing the community. Since the acquisition of MayaData, OpenEBS has reached a milestone 3.1 release, including the production ready Mayastor 1.0 storage engine which delivers NVMe grade performance from a disaggregated storage infrastructure. We’ve also seen new community members getting involved. Civo (@DMajrekar) have been very supportive and active contributors through their production use of Mayastor and by making staging systems and diagnostic data available for product improvements. We continue to receive contributions from individual contributors, including a subject matter expert from a key technology player in this space who is interested in contributing designs and implementations to expand the feature set. Earlier this week we published a change to the scheduling and cadence of community meetings to encourage wider participation and make them more accessible to those who have expressed an interest in being involved. We’re actively planning a UK-based community meetup and are open to holding them in other regions. We continue to raise awareness of the project through talks at SNIA, Data on Kubernetes and with a proposal for KubeCon NA 2022. We recognise that there is a lot more potential to build the community and will be exploring CNCF resources to assist with this. With the acquisition of MayaData and the earlier successful incubation of LitmusChaos, some of the key maintainers have moved on to other areas of interest. We have identified several individuals whose consistent contributions and commitment make them deserving candidates as maintainers. We started updating the list a while ago, but partly due to inexperience with the process, this has stalled; we will prioritise getting it done. (@RichiH , #3548) We are very interested in moving forward with incubation for OpenEBS, not least because of the recognition of project maturity that it represents. The last feedback we received from the Storage TAG was about the difficulty of knowing how to classify a project that contains multiple independent storage drivers. There is an obvious benefit for adopters in having a single project brand to tie things together, but it’s unclear how adoption and contribution should best be measured. As we’ve reflected on this advice, we’ve concluded that we should focus resources around the Mayastor engine which delivers the most strategic value, rather than on the other engines which are now mostly feature complete. We would welcome further guidance on how best to proceed with incubation from a CNCF perspective. Following the acquisition, DataCore’s primary focus was to get the Mayastor engine to production quality as rapidly as possible. Achieving this has required a significant engineering investment and much of the work took place in local repos, whilst planning future involvement. Combined with the loss of some key maintainers, this resulted in a significant drop in apparent involvement as measured by devstats. The changes have now been merged into the public repos and development will continue with the open-source first approach that has always characterised OpenEBS. The devstats ‘Contributions chart’ reflects this, with a steady rise over the last three months. Are we getting everything right? No, it’s quite clear we are not, but we are trying to! We’ve lost the active involvement, but not the support, of several key contributors. We’ve also taken longer to respond to some things than we should. However, as a primary backer of the project, DataCore is committed to investing in the OpenEBS community and in learning what it means to be good open-source citizens in this context. A measure of DataCore’s commitment to this as a long-term strategic initiative is that it envisages OpenEBS forming the nucleus of its future storage architectures. Please bear with us as we navigate the changes and let us know where we can improve! |
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Thanks a lot for the details, @nconnolly1. Are you able to guesstimate a timeline of the planned and started actions gaining traction? It's not urgent, we just want to anticipate a timeline for the graduation process. |
Hi @RichiH - I spoke to @GlennBullingham today and he is actively working on cleaning up the maintainers list, including contacting people to check whether they still wish to be involved. He's also cleaning up the permissions on the repos and will move on to the other areas afterwards. I'll let @GlennBullingham comment on timescales. |
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Hi @RichiH. As Nick has already said, I and some of the other maintainers/contributors are actively working to make updates and improvements to project administration in a number of areas, as well to put processes and documentation in place to ensure that this will be just the beginning of a sustainable initiative of better community engagement.
Should I have misunderstood your reference to timescales, or should there be other timescales of interest which I’ve not addressed here then please let me know. Is there anything else that I can clarify or help with in the meantime? Regards, |
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Thanks for the level of detail; looks good and we can mentally pencil in
mid/end of October.
Sent by mobile; please excuse my brevity..
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@GlennBullingham @nconnolly1 How is it looking now? |
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Hi @dims - apologies for the delay in replying. @GlennBullingham has done a lot of work contacting maintainers and determining their desire to continue in the role. As a result, the project now has an updated MAINTAINERS.md which lists active maintainers and emeritus maintainers (who still wish to remain involved but are not currently active). Due to recent internal changes at DataCore I am no longer involved with helping to guide the future direction of the project. Probably the best starting point for questions about day to day matters would be the list of current maintainers (@GlennBullingham @gila @kmova @pawanpraka1 @vishnuitta). Questions about DataCore's strategic involvement can best be handled by DataCore's CPO, Abhijit Dey. I don't have a GitHub handle to include here, so I'll send him a link to this issue for him to respond. |
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Thanks @GlennBullingham @nconnolly1 ! We had agreed internally to see how contributions pick up after the latest update. Looking at https://github.com/openebs/openebs/graphs/contributors It seems the project is more in maintenance mode than under active development. Is there a confirmed roadmap or similar we can review? |
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PS: As part of this, could you please also update #506 with the most current information? |
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As per #1051 , CNCF TOC has moved forward with an archival proposal for the OpenEBS project. For the notice in the project issues, please see openebs/openebs#3634 CNCF staff will reach out to all project maintainers and the CNCF end user community. CC @nconnolly1 @GlennBullingham @gila @kmova @pawanpraka1 @vishnuitta |
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There is definitely scope for improvement, but the data being collected to reflect the health of the project is incorrect. The source code that is actively maintained is under multiple sub-repositories. The graph above is primarily for project tracking. Also, from an historical project context perspective, there were discussions as part of the OpenEBS Incubation proposal to migrate users towards Mayastor - from older engines - like cStor and Jiva. For example, here is the status of contributions. 
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The project is very much alive and extremely well used by the community. As an example... we had a major validation of the project in the las few days. Microsoft Azure has recognized OpenEBS (Mayastor Data-Engine) as a core enabling technology for their new "Azure Container Storage Cloud Services" and has built their entire new Container storage service offering on the OpenEBS Project (Maystor NVMe Data-Engine). The Microsoft Azure launch announcement and OpenEBS details are below. In my discussion with the MSFT Azure PM, R&D and Eng teams during the design & evolution of Microsoft's Azure Container service (based on OpenEBS)... MSFT revealed that they expect 100'000's - 1000,000's of new Azure Container customers deploy the new Azure Container Storage (which will all be driven by OpenEBS Mayastor under the covers). It would be somewhat sad to archive the project now that we've just had a major validation milestone that... (I believe) no other CNCF Container Storage project can claim to have achieved. 1: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/public-preview-azure-container-storage/ |
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Commenting here to also share that this project is alive and well used by the community. I was surprised to see this message as we (kurl.sh) and other projects adopt and rely on the OpenEBS project as a dependency. Reading through this thread and others, I've seen a few other organizations really disappointed with the decision because they are active users of this project (Microsoft, Civo, Replicated, more) My understanding of the reasoning for this decision was a continued and prolonged decrease in development activity in the project. This data is backed by Devstats charts that show contributions to the project declining over time. As some projects mature and gain adoption, I expect some will slow down feature development but have solid (increasing) adoption. And I think that's the case here. Certainly the acquisition referenced played an impact, but it hasn't changed how much the community adopts and relies on this project. An OSS project that isn't under active feature development but has 100s or 1000s of active users is certainly a healthy project. Are there any data that we can pull or reference to understand the impact of pulling this project out of the CNCF Sandbox? Many organizations (including mine) will likely look for alternatives now, so the action to archive OpenEBS will likely have the effect of decreased adoption of the project. I recognize and respect the work that the TOC has done in creating a transparent archival process for projects. And I also recognize that I'm coming in after the work was done with a comment on the outcome, which isn't the best. (I wish I had seen this and was more involved in the process). The impact of archiving a stable project that has a decent amount of adoption by various organizations is significant, and I'm hoping that the TOC can provide some data showing adoption of this project vs others (or over time) to help validate the projects declining health. |
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Additionally, the k0s project comes bundled with OpenEBS hostpath storage as the only bundled CSI driver. |
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Just posting this here and also making a note to myself to update the content in the openebs/openebs page. Here is a reference to the community meeting notes that are being held - to discuss the direction of the Mayastor project. And shows the participation from the companies that are replying on OpenEBS. https://hackmd.io/@openebs/Bye3IKkA9#OpenEBS-Community-SyncUp-Meeting-Minutes |
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I want to add my experience with the project as a user: I'm playing with Mayastor on a personal cluster, and ran into an issue with a volume not attaching. I asked in the #openebs channel on Kubernetes Slack, and was helped directly by one of the project maintainers. Parts of the OpenEBS project may be quiet, but the Mayastor project is both pushing releases regularly and providing a very welcoming community. |
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TOC had an in-person offsite this week and also discussed inactive projects in general and OpenEBS in particular. After reaching out to TAG Storage Slack channel and based on private feedback, I have asked @chira001 and @xing-yang, TAG Storage co-chairs, if the TAG could come up with specific suggestions and/or requirements of how an active and healthy OpenEBS could look like. TOC will enter a six month observation phase and make a decision based on project actions and community feedback in March 2024. Also see https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C6PK4RLF7/p1694208906778189 |
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Just a quick note regarding this issue. OpenEBS maintainers met with the TAG team at KubeCon NA 2023 to chart out a plan to address the concerns. Will share more details as we solidify the action plan. At a high level, the intent is to focus on the most widely used/deployed engines in production and engines that are CNCF license compliant, simplify the messaging around the active engines. |
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During KubeCon Chicago, @kmova and I also found some time to sit together and we talked through the action plan. I believe Datacore / OpenEBS leadership wanted to share this plan in writing soon (relative to the KC meeting) and I understood the intention to be to have tangible goals, dates, and commitments. As mentioned on Slack with Dave Bright (@orville-wright), it would be good to have that sooner rather than later. For transparency: TOC is internally moving to being more assertive in archival and there will be another TOC offsite middle of February. |
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Hi @RichiH, I am an end user observing the state of the project WRT the CNCF. Could you inform us on the TOC decision for OpenEBS's status as a CNCF project that you mentioned in September was slated to be made last month ? Thanks a lot in advance. |
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Hi Benjamin,
As per the linked issue, the archival vote passed and OpenEBS is archived.
They are currently working on cleanup with an intention to reapply.
Sent by mobile; please excuse my brevity.
…On Sun, Apr 14, 2024, 19:30 Benjamin Habié ***@***.***> wrote:
Hi @RichiH <https://github.com/RichiH>, I am an end user observing the
state of the project WRT the CNCF. Could you inform us on the TOC decision
for OpenEBS's status as a CNCF project that you mentioned in September was
slated to be made last month ? Thanks a lot in advance.
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Hi again @RichiH, thanks a lot for your prompt answer and sorry if I wasn't clear, but I am talking about this:
from your comment here, i.e 3 months after the project was archived, in order to assess the future health of the project IIUC. Was this observation phase (and consequently decision taking) canceled ? |
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Hi @adamency, I am a core Maintainer / Admin of the CNCF OpenEBS project. You can see the latest ISSUE updates here...
Our project is very active and is continuing to move forward. In parallel to this work, we continue to actively support 1.2Million happy OpenEBS users and 8.5 Millions successful product installations. Making us the most successful CNCF Storage project; with the most GitHub stars (8600). So we have a big responsibility to a large CNCF user community and install base. We are writing a tone of new code and working with the OpenEBS community on many major updates & features. - All is well with the OpenEBS product. In 3 days, the first major phase of the restructuring will be executed; as per outlined by OpenEBS Issues #3701 and #3709. If you have any questions, I recommend you also post your comments on the OpenEBS Issues (#3701 and #3709) community as well as here on CNCF TOC #905 Issue. - This way all of the OpenEBS Maintainers and Admins ( @tiagolobocastro @avishnu @niladrih @Abhinandan-Purkait ) can quickly comment and provide more details/info for you. - Everyone will be able to help you better. Additionally, your comments will be more visible to all OpenEBS users. (i.e. not everyone actively tracks & follows the CNCF TOC Issues threads... like you are). Hope this helps |
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Hi @adamency, I forgot to mention.... Its gone through some major updates and there is a lot of new / updated info there that will probably answer a lot of your questions. Also, you should head over to our CNCF Slack channel #openebs : https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CUAKPFU78 The maintainers and community are very active on the GitHub Issues and Slack community. Hope this helps, |
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Hi @adamency, the observation phase is over, and the conclusion was the archival vote as per #1051 -- this is looking back, though. For looking forward, please see the replies by @orville-wright |
Chatter from TOC folks looking at Incubation prospects of OpenEBS:
Looking at the devstats graphs:
Market news:
Looks like when the main backers of OpenEBS project namely MayaData got acquired, the project has not been the same unfortunately. There has been a steep drop off in both technical activity and community aspects as well.
Questions:
thanks,
Dims
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