[Gluster-infra] Gluster project using CentOS infra for Test/Release work

[Karanbir Singh]

Hi,

Some of us met at Devconf for a conversation around how best the
CentOS infra might be used within the Gluster projects. Here is a
quick catchup from that meeting, and to further encourate conversation
around the topic.

Meeting attended by:
- Michael Schearer
- Amye Scavarda
- Humble Chirammal
- Kaleb Keithley
- Niels de Vos
- Jim Perrim ( CentOS )
- Karanbir Singh ( CentOS )

The existing gluster devel workflow was established as :
- Upstream dev work happens in git
- Gerrit queues are used to manage the content / contributor flow
- Jenkins is used as the orchestration tool to validate contributions
  + Jenkins slaves are deployed against a central Jenkins Server
  + each Jenkins slave represents a role or distro or test req
  + Jenkins slaves are run both locally, as well as in
    RackSpace sponsored Cloud Instances
  + Packaging is something that may or maynot be tested ( some
    projects do, others dont )
- Release Managers own the cutoff / feature specs
 + Content of each release
 + Documentation
 + Releases are not executed in packaged paylogs
- Packaging team ( or folks from dev/release teams )
 + Local set of rpms done from gluster.org
 + Liase with delivery upstreams / distros for packaging in their space

We established that there are 2 major points of concern at this time.
1) Jenkins and Gerrit self hosted are flaky and need unreasonable amount
of real time effort to keep running
2) Being able to test in real world deployment scenarios is hard.

The CentOS Project curates a build and test infrastructure that is open
to projects like Gluster,
who have a SIG presence and have a user story in the CentOS Ecosystem.
We feel being able to help
the Gluster project is key for us. Added to that, we can also use the
Gluster artifacts and expose
them to related layered projects who have a dependancy on Gluster's
projects directly ( eg. ovirt,
openstack etc ), in the same infrastructure.

Therefore I would like to welcome the Gluster project to come and use
our Jenkins instance at https://ci.centos.org/ and use the downstream
testing + release mechanics we have in the project. I also feel we are
able to get this done with little impact to the larger developer
expectations in the Gluster projects. Some of the points highlighed:
- Self hosted Gerrit should move to Gerrithub.io!
- Are all the needed plugins available on Gerrithub ?
  + if not, can an easy compromise be found ?
- Will the existing history migrate to Gerrithub ?
- Developer discipline will need to be established to negate the impact
  of duplicate / redundant identities ( same person multi email add etc )

In a followup meeting, Brian Stinson ( CentOS Team ) spent
time with MS ( Gluster QE ) to explain the flow of how
ci.centos.org is setup, how tests can be depoyed, and results
collected, notifications run and what the expectations would be.

There are some highlights from the centos infra : we have an automated,
baremetal driven test infra. That allows multinode deployments, scale
out testing. We are also going to have a cloud native test infra in the
near term, allowing for cloud workload testing - again from a user and
developer perspective. The resource limits, while they do exist, are
liberal and in many cases, negotiable. All of this runs as a service to
you guys, in the gluster project, so you can focus on writing awesome
storage code, let us run the Jenkins.

We also established that there are some machines waiting bring up in the
Community Cage - depending on how the Gluster project can use them or
not, we would welcome including them in the larger CentOS community side
pool, ensuring they get used well.

Brian, Jim and I will be in the Bangalore office on the 3rd
and 4th of March. Brian has offered to run a demo and face
to face onboarding process for the Gluster team in the office
on the 3rd in the afternoon, should this be seen as valuable.

CentOS infra is deployed, in production now. We can start bringing jobs
over right away, to suite your requirements / release timelines.

Regards

-- 
Karanbir Singh
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
GnuPG Key : http://www.karan.org/publickey.asc