Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-27 Thread Will Stevens
ecially not in the
> multitude of ways and users could be using them (SBP excepted).
>
> I won't go into a lengthy discussion about all your individual points,
> I'll just say that I largely agree, and point people to the site to site
> VPN feature as an example. It's implemented in openswan which I have no
> problem with, except the documentation on openswan.org around how to
> connect it to various vendor's endpoints is sparse to non-existent.  Also
> the only place to see errors relating to the VPN are in a log file on the
> VPC virtual router which the user has no access to. VPNs are tricky enough
> to set up at the best of times, doing it without any feedback is a
> nightmare.  This would never pass any decent user acceptance testing.
>
> To throw an idea in the ring, *maybe* for a feature to be accepted, its
> design document and functional specification have to have been 'signed off'
> by x independent 'users'.  Controversial I know, but I think it makes a
> good starting point for us to think about how the people on the user
> mailing list can get involved. A Section in the CloudStack wiki maintained
> by users showing the features that they may put input into might help.  Or
> a 'features & improvements ' mailing list might serve as neutral territory
> for users and developers to have conversations...
>
>  Just some thoughts..
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Paul Angus
> Cloud Architect
> D: +44 20 3468 5163 |S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +44 7711 418 784 | T:
> @CloudyAngus
> paul.an...@shapeblue.com
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Adrian Lewis [mailto:adr...@alsiconsulting.co.uk]
> Sent: 24 February 2015 02:57
> To: users@cloudstack.apache.org; d...@cloudstack.apache.org
> Subject: RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)
>
> Hi Marcus, Somesh, Paul
>
> Thanks for responding and yes, I think in some aspects I may be asking too
> much but this isn't just me asking for extra/additional/new features per se.
> I think it's easier if I split up the issues that I perceive to be
> problems into four distinct areas. There's overlap between them but it
> might help me explain better:
>
> 1. New features
> 2. Features that are already there but that can’t be used 3. Features that
> are turned on that can't be turned off 4. Features that work but which
> could do with a more granular implementation
>
> In more detail:
>
> 1. New features:
> Yes this is a contentious one (QoS, Dynamic Routing, OpenVPN etc). I think
> that this is the greedy ask and it's not feasible or even fair to ask for
> stuff for free. Believe it or not, I'm not asking "for CloudStack to
> provide and maintain a fully fledged and featured router distribution in
> its provided virtual router". If customer demand pays for something new and
> cool to be developed and it's contributed back then great but this sort of
> thing can't be an expectation by default. For those that do want more, the
> solution here though might be, IMHO the ability to either:
>
> a) Provide a relatively simple way for users (not devs) to customise the
> VR themselves, adding/swapping/deleting packages, orchestration agents
> (puppet ansible salt etc) and giving people access to the VR for
> configuration without the risk of deletion on recreation; making the VR a
> 'first-class citizen' vm instead of a disposable commodity.
>
> b) Allow the use of third party router/firewall VMs to be used instead of
> the default VR. Obviously, this would be at the sacrifice of functions that
> a 3rd party might not provide such as userdata and most other functions
> would have to be managed manually on the VR without the orchestration
> functionality that ACS provides with the official system VMs. There appears
> to already be a way to do this but I can’t find much information on this so
> I might be very wrong. The router.template. setting lets me
> create my own VR template but things went very wrong when I tried using it
> so I gave up. This setting also applies to every single vr in the entire
> zone which is not going to fit for many, especially if the replacement is a
> commercially licensed product. This is what I gather Somesh alluded to in
> his reply. It would be great if we could offer a choice of built-in VR, a
> Vyatta VR or a Cisco VR depending on the customer requirements without
> having to code a separate network provider for each, get it committed and
> wait for a new release.
>
> 2. Features that are already there but that can’t be used These are things
> like being able to configure the IPsec VPNs, iptables firewall/NAT rules,
> or routing tables on VRs in more detail. At the moment, if it can’t be
> 

RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-24 Thread Paul Angus
Hi Adrian,

Obviously I have to pick you up on not including the  tag, so I can't 
tell where it started :)
Otherwise I'm pretty much in complete agreement.

The community is probably too developer focused and for the project to stay 
relevant we probably need to redress that balance. What we really need are 
user-community driven features and far more user-input into the feature 
development process, and I agree that means making it more friendly to 
non-developers.  I'm not anti-developer, some of my best friends are developers 
:) but due to the job description, they don't tend to spend a lot of time 
consuming the product that they build especially not in the multitude of ways 
and users could be using them (SBP excepted).

I won't go into a lengthy discussion about all your individual points, I'll 
just say that I largely agree, and point people to the site to site VPN feature 
as an example. It's implemented in openswan which I have no problem with, 
except the documentation on openswan.org around how to connect it to various 
vendor's endpoints is sparse to non-existent.  Also the only place to see 
errors relating to the VPN are in a log file on the VPC virtual router which 
the user has no access to. VPNs are tricky enough to set up at the best of 
times, doing it without any feedback is a nightmare.  This would never pass any 
decent user acceptance testing.

To throw an idea in the ring, *maybe* for a feature to be accepted, its design 
document and functional specification have to have been 'signed off' by x 
independent 'users'.  Controversial I know, but I think it makes a good 
starting point for us to think about how the people on the user mailing list 
can get involved. A Section in the CloudStack wiki maintained by users showing 
the features that they may put input into might help.  Or a 'features & 
improvements ' mailing list might serve as neutral territory for users and 
developers to have conversations...

 Just some thoughts..


Regards,

Paul Angus
Cloud Architect
D: +44 20 3468 5163 |S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +44 7711 418 784 | T: @CloudyAngus
paul.an...@shapeblue.com

-Original Message-
From: Adrian Lewis [mailto:adr...@alsiconsulting.co.uk]
Sent: 24 February 2015 02:57
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org; d...@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

Hi Marcus, Somesh, Paul

Thanks for responding and yes, I think in some aspects I may be asking too much 
but this isn't just me asking for extra/additional/new features per se.
I think it's easier if I split up the issues that I perceive to be problems 
into four distinct areas. There's overlap between them but it might help me 
explain better:

1. New features
2. Features that are already there but that can’t be used 3. Features that are 
turned on that can't be turned off 4. Features that work but which could do 
with a more granular implementation

In more detail:

1. New features:
Yes this is a contentious one (QoS, Dynamic Routing, OpenVPN etc). I think that 
this is the greedy ask and it's not feasible or even fair to ask for stuff for 
free. Believe it or not, I'm not asking "for CloudStack to provide and maintain 
a fully fledged and featured router distribution in its provided virtual 
router". If customer demand pays for something new and cool to be developed and 
it's contributed back then great but this sort of thing can't be an expectation 
by default. For those that do want more, the solution here though might be, 
IMHO the ability to either:

a) Provide a relatively simple way for users (not devs) to customise the VR 
themselves, adding/swapping/deleting packages, orchestration agents (puppet 
ansible salt etc) and giving people access to the VR for configuration without 
the risk of deletion on recreation; making the VR a 'first-class citizen' vm 
instead of a disposable commodity.

b) Allow the use of third party router/firewall VMs to be used instead of the 
default VR. Obviously, this would be at the sacrifice of functions that a 3rd 
party might not provide such as userdata and most other functions would have to 
be managed manually on the VR without the orchestration functionality that ACS 
provides with the official system VMs. There appears to already be a way to do 
this but I can’t find much information on this so I might be very wrong. The 
router.template. setting lets me create my own VR template but 
things went very wrong when I tried using it so I gave up. This setting also 
applies to every single vr in the entire zone which is not going to fit for 
many, especially if the replacement is a commercially licensed product. This is 
what I gather Somesh alluded to in his reply. It would be great if we could 
offer a choice of built-in VR, a Vyatta VR or a Cisco VR depending on the 
customer requirements without having to code a s

RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-23 Thread Adrian Lewis
Hi PL,

Thanks for your feedback - appreciated that you've taken the time to read
through the emails. I may be wrong but I get the impression that Jira is
great for specific features that may result from discussion here, at meetups
or CCC but I'm not convinced that someone like me posting stuff there is
likely to have a positive reception. Firstly, as Paul also mentions, I doubt
that many users (or potential users) would use it even if they did know of
its existence. I don’t think it is likely to garner responses from an
accurate enough sample of voters. Secondly, even within the dev community,
how many of you regularly look at feature requests (not sure I would to be
brutally honest)?

If anyone would be interested in a discussion at the next EU usergroup (i.e.
London) I'd be more than happy to contribute what knowledge I have (largely
networking & network security) and I'm happy to be told about stuff I
clearly know nothing about - maybe some of my assumptions are completely
wrong. Call it a SIG, panel discussion etc. We might even be able to
formulate a half-decent spec before we get too drunk.

Adrian

-Original Message-
From: Pierre-Luc Dion [mailto:pd...@cloudops.com]
Sent: 24 February 2015 02:07
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Cc: d...@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

For voting on new features why not use the voting capability of Jira for new
feature? at least it would give an idea if their is interest about new
features and improvement.  test:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12330479  (logon required)

Regarding spec of new features they still need a feature spec into the wiki
that is also use to define a release.


PL


On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Paul Angus 
wrote:

> I'm largely in agreement with Adrian on this.
>
> I think we all understand that the members of the community are
> largely driven by some form of self-interest, individuals are paid to
> develop feature x because their company want it enough or they do it
> because they want to and their company has given them freedom to do a
> certain amount of stuff for the sheer hell of it.
>
> The projects' users' challenge is to find a way to incentivise some
> developers to develop the features which the users want to see.  If
> the user base can demonstrate that enough of them want a feature then
> the case is already made that it is a real need.
>
> So I am all for the 'users' banding together, forming special interest
> groups and writing design specs, even having their own mini votes on
> things.  We can't hope to get anything written  without solid
> requirements in the first place. That has to be the first step.
>
> And if anyone has any ideas about a mechanism to incentivise the
> development of the features I'm all ears.
>
>
> [Power to the people]
>
>
> Regards
>
> Paul Angus
> Cloud Architect
> S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +447711418784 | T: CloudyAngus
> paul.an...@shapeblue.com
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Marcus [mailto:shadow...@gmail.com]
> Sent: 22 February 2015 07:08
> To: d...@cloudstack.apache.org
> Cc: users@cloudstack.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)
>
> The points raised are certainly valid from an enterprise networking
> standpoint, and don't fall on deaf ears, but we should keep things in
> perspective. To provide the aforementioned features would be
> relatively uncharted territory in the cloud orchestration world (at
> least not considering vendor provided networking solutions that only
> handle the network part of the equation), so while it would be good to
> aspire to providing those things, it should be no surprise that the
> platform works that way and lacks such features.
>
> For further perspective, keep in mind that cloud orchestration in
> general has been a pitch to software developers and management for
> "easy infrastructure". Cloud consumers are end users, web developers,
> application developers, so again it should be no surprise that the
> product provides features that cater to that, rather than providing
> the bells and whistles that a network admin would want to see in their
> infrastructure. CloudStack was never built to be pitched to network
> teams as a cure for managing their infra deployments, the only cloud
> product providers doing that are network vendors who have cloud
> networking products. This is of course why a VPC needs IPs defined, as
> applications care more about how to serve up a web page than network
> engineering and managing distinct layer 2 and 3, so the whole network
> stack is sandwiched into a simple orchestration mechanism that gets the
> application what it needs.
>
> In designing and deploying cloud, the

RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-23 Thread Adrian Lewis
g very simple or you create a VPC for each
application that you build it's less of an issue but if you're using ACS as
part of your more traditional corporate infrastructure, for DR purposes, for
hybrid cloud purposes etc, it's a very notable WTF to any network engineer
when they first see it. This example may be in place to make things simpler
elsewhere (such as routes, firewall rules & VPN connections) but in my mind
is simply brushing additional complexity in the future under the
metaphorical carpet.

Trying to flip the dev/networking approach here, it would be like creating a
really cool automated way of installing and configuring MySQL on every VM
but stopping anyone from uninstalling it or using anything other than
InnoDB. The network guy might say "Why do you need anything other than
MySQL/InnoDB and if you don’t want it, don’t use it". The dev/ops/devops guy
would say they'd rather have a plain VM with no DB at all and install
themselves if needed than have the really cool automation. Let users decide
whether they want ACS to do cool stuff for them or whether they just want
the basics and they'll do the rest (if more is even needed).

In summary, while my initial rant may have come across as wanting more for
nothing, priority 1 for me is actually the option to have *less* but the
ability for me to tweak stuff myself instead of having ACS enforce its view
on how things should be done. Leave the templated network provisioning
procedures alone for where they fit, perhaps leave them as defaults, but don’t
enforce them or assume that everyone wants them. I don't think it is safe to
assume that "Cloud consumers are end users, web developers, application
developers". IMHO, making that assumption, is the cause of the same effect.
If we reject that assumption, we may find ACS to be a bit more welcoming to
others. I don’t believe that more is necessarily needed, in fact less.

Adrian


-Original Message-----
From: Marcus [mailto:shadow...@gmail.com]
Sent: 22 February 2015 07:08
To: d...@cloudstack.apache.org
Cc: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

The points raised are certainly valid from an enterprise networking
standpoint, and don't fall on deaf ears, but we should keep things in
perspective. To provide the aforementioned features would be relatively
uncharted territory in the cloud orchestration world (at least not
considering vendor provided networking solutions that only handle the
network part of the equation), so while it would be good to aspire to
providing those things, it should be no surprise that the platform works
that way and lacks such features.

For further perspective, keep in mind that cloud orchestration in general
has been a pitch to software developers and management for "easy
infrastructure". Cloud consumers are end users, web developers, application
developers, so again it should be no surprise that the product provides
features that cater to that, rather than providing the bells and whistles
that a network admin would want to see in their infrastructure. CloudStack
was never built to be pitched to network teams as a cure for managing their
infra deployments, the only cloud product providers doing that are network
vendors who have cloud networking products. This is of course why a VPC
needs IPs defined, as applications care more about how to serve up a web
page than network engineering and managing distinct layer 2 and 3, so the
whole network stack is sandwiched into a simple orchestration mechanism that
gets the application what it needs.

In designing and deploying cloud, the most common complaint I see from
people who are infrastructure maintainers is "why can't I just build the
infrastructure the way I want and then have it orchestrated?".
Unfortunately, we can't just automate and integrate with anyone's pet
design. CloudStack supports many novel and custom network designs simply by
allowing the option of letting you manage the network hardware and being
hands-off (shared/public networks), while also being pluggable to allow
vendors to take over whatever features and they wish. I've seen some pretty
advanced overlay networking provided through third party plugins to
CloudStack that take over all network functionality and provide more.

What's really being asked for here is for CloudStack to provide and maintain
a fully fledged and featured router distribution in its provided virtual
router. It's an admirable project to have if we can get support for it. My
guess is there's a bit of a disconnect in interest though, because many (but
not all) enterprises who want CloudStack for infrastructure automation are
skeptical about a VM as software router and prefer to bring in
aforementioned enterprise vendors who have their own plugins. People who
provide cloud hosting and other services tend to use the routers, but their
interest in 

Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-23 Thread Pierre-Luc Dion
For voting on new features why not use the voting capability of Jira for
new feature? at least it would give an idea if their is interest about new
features and improvement.  test:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12330479  (logon required)

Regarding spec of new features they still need a feature spec into the wiki
that is also use to define a release.


PL


On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Paul Angus 
wrote:

> I'm largely in agreement with Adrian on this.
>
> I think we all understand that the members of the community are largely
> driven by some form of self-interest, individuals are paid to develop
> feature x because their company want it enough or they do it because they
> want to and their company has given them freedom to do a certain amount of
> stuff for the sheer hell of it.
>
> The projects' users' challenge is to find a way to incentivise some
> developers to develop the features which the users want to see.  If the
> user base can demonstrate that enough of them want a feature then the case
> is already made that it is a real need.
>
> So I am all for the 'users' banding together, forming special interest
> groups and writing design specs, even having their own mini votes on
> things.  We can't hope to get anything written  without solid requirements
> in the first place. That has to be the first step.
>
> And if anyone has any ideas about a mechanism to incentivise the
> development of the features I'm all ears.
>
>
> [Power to the people]
>
>
> Regards
>
> Paul Angus
> Cloud Architect
> S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +447711418784 | T: CloudyAngus
> paul.an...@shapeblue.com
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Marcus [mailto:shadow...@gmail.com]
> Sent: 22 February 2015 07:08
> To: d...@cloudstack.apache.org
> Cc: users@cloudstack.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)
>
> The points raised are certainly valid from an enterprise networking
> standpoint, and don't fall on deaf ears, but we should keep things in
> perspective. To provide the aforementioned features would be relatively
> uncharted territory in the cloud orchestration world (at least not
> considering vendor provided networking solutions that only handle the
> network part of the equation), so while it would be good to aspire to
> providing those things, it should be no surprise that the platform works
> that way and lacks such features.
>
> For further perspective, keep in mind that cloud orchestration in general
> has been a pitch to software developers and management for "easy
> infrastructure". Cloud consumers are end users, web developers, application
> developers, so again it should be no surprise that the product provides
> features that cater to that, rather than providing the bells and whistles
> that a network admin would want to see in their infrastructure. CloudStack
> was never built to be pitched to network teams as a cure for managing their
> infra deployments, the only cloud product providers doing that are network
> vendors who have cloud networking products. This is of course why a VPC
> needs IPs defined, as applications care more about how to serve up a web
> page than network engineering and managing distinct layer 2 and 3, so the
> whole network stack is sandwiched into a simple orchestration mechanism
> that gets the application what it needs.
>
> In designing and deploying cloud, the most common complaint I see from
> people who are infrastructure maintainers is "why can't I just build the
> infrastructure the way I want and then have it orchestrated?".
> Unfortunately, we can't just automate and integrate with anyone's pet
> design. CloudStack supports many novel and custom network designs simply by
> allowing the option of letting you manage the network hardware and being
> hands-off (shared/public networks), while also being pluggable to allow
> vendors to take over whatever features and they wish. I've seen some pretty
> advanced overlay networking provided through third party plugins to
> CloudStack that take over all network functionality and provide more.
>
> What's really being asked for here is for CloudStack to provide and
> maintain a fully-fledged and featured router distribution in its provided
> virtual router. It's an admirable project to have if we can get support for
> it. My guess is there's a bit of a disconnect in interest though, because
> many (but not all) enterprises who want CloudStack for infrastructure
> automation are skeptical about a VM as software router and prefer to bring
> in aforementioned enterprise vendors who have their own plugins. People who
> provide cloud hosting and other services tend to use t

RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-23 Thread Paul Angus
I'm largely in agreement with Adrian on this.

I think we all understand that the members of the community are largely driven 
by some form of self-interest, individuals are paid to develop feature x 
because their company want it enough or they do it because they want to and 
their company has given them freedom to do a certain amount of stuff for the 
sheer hell of it.

The projects' users' challenge is to find a way to incentivise some developers 
to develop the features which the users want to see.  If the user base can 
demonstrate that enough of them want a feature then the case is already made 
that it is a real need.

So I am all for the 'users' banding together, forming special interest groups 
and writing design specs, even having their own mini votes on things.  We can't 
hope to get anything written  without solid requirements in the first place. 
That has to be the first step.

And if anyone has any ideas about a mechanism to incentivise the development of 
the features I'm all ears.


[Power to the people]


Regards

Paul Angus
Cloud Architect
S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +447711418784 | T: CloudyAngus
paul.an...@shapeblue.com

-Original Message-
From: Marcus [mailto:shadow...@gmail.com]
Sent: 22 February 2015 07:08
To: d...@cloudstack.apache.org
Cc: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

The points raised are certainly valid from an enterprise networking standpoint, 
and don't fall on deaf ears, but we should keep things in perspective. To 
provide the aforementioned features would be relatively uncharted territory in 
the cloud orchestration world (at least not considering vendor provided 
networking solutions that only handle the network part of the equation), so 
while it would be good to aspire to providing those things, it should be no 
surprise that the platform works that way and lacks such features.

For further perspective, keep in mind that cloud orchestration in general has 
been a pitch to software developers and management for "easy infrastructure". 
Cloud consumers are end users, web developers, application developers, so again 
it should be no surprise that the product provides features that cater to that, 
rather than providing the bells and whistles that a network admin would want to 
see in their infrastructure. CloudStack was never built to be pitched to 
network teams as a cure for managing their infra deployments, the only cloud 
product providers doing that are network vendors who have cloud networking 
products. This is of course why a VPC needs IPs defined, as applications care 
more about how to serve up a web page than network engineering and managing 
distinct layer 2 and 3, so the whole network stack is sandwiched into a simple 
orchestration mechanism that gets the application what it needs.

In designing and deploying cloud, the most common complaint I see from people 
who are infrastructure maintainers is "why can't I just build the 
infrastructure the way I want and then have it orchestrated?".
Unfortunately, we can't just automate and integrate with anyone's pet design. 
CloudStack supports many novel and custom network designs simply by allowing 
the option of letting you manage the network hardware and being hands-off 
(shared/public networks), while also being pluggable to allow vendors to take 
over whatever features and they wish. I've seen some pretty advanced overlay 
networking provided through third party plugins to CloudStack that take over 
all network functionality and provide more.

What's really being asked for here is for CloudStack to provide and maintain a 
fully-fledged and featured router distribution in its provided virtual router. 
It's an admirable project to have if we can get support for it. My guess is 
there's a bit of a disconnect in interest though, because many (but not all) 
enterprises who want CloudStack for infrastructure automation are skeptical 
about a VM as software router and prefer to bring in aforementioned enterprise 
vendors who have their own plugins. People who provide cloud hosting and other 
services tend to use the routers, but their interest in enterprise level 
routing and redundancy varies greatly, and their customers are designing their 
apps to be resilient to infrastructure loss (e.g. most AWS customers). That's 
of course not entirely the whole truth, as is evidenced by the work we are 
seeing on redundant routers, but I do believe that's why we haven't seen these 
things from the beginning. They just haven't been all that important to the 
target customers, even though infrastructure engineers are used to providing 
them.

So now comes my philosophy. In the end, I think the great thing about open 
source communities is that if there's the right level of interest, it will 
happen.  I'm the kind of person who feels a pang of stress at t

Re: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-21 Thread Marcus
The points raised are certainly valid from an enterprise networking
standpoint, and don't fall on deaf ears, but we should keep things in
perspective. To provide the aforementioned features would be
relatively uncharted territory in the cloud orchestration world (at
least not considering vendor provided networking solutions that only
handle the network part of the equation), so while it would be good to
aspire to providing those things, it should be no surprise that the
platform works that way and lacks such features.

For further perspective, keep in mind that cloud orchestration in
general has been a pitch to software developers and management for
"easy infrastructure". Cloud consumers are end users, web developers,
application developers, so again it should be no surprise that the
product provides features that cater to that, rather than providing
the bells and whistles that a network admin would want to see in their
infrastructure. CloudStack was never built to be pitched to network
teams as a cure for managing their infra deployments, the only cloud
product providers doing that are network vendors who have cloud
networking products. This is of course why a VPC needs IPs defined, as
applications care more about how to serve up a web page than network
engineering and managing distinct layer 2 and 3, so the whole network
stack is sandwiched into a simple orchestration mechanism that gets
the application what it needs.

In designing and deploying cloud, the most common complaint I see from
people who are infrastructure maintainers is "why can't I just build
the infrastructure the way I want and then have it orchestrated?".
Unfortunately, we can't just automate and integrate with anyone's pet
design. CloudStack supports many novel and custom network designs
simply by allowing the option of letting you manage the network
hardware and being hands-off (shared/public networks), while also
being pluggable to allow vendors to take over whatever features and
they wish. I've seen some pretty advanced overlay networking provided
through third party plugins to CloudStack that take over all network
functionality and provide more.

What's really being asked for here is for CloudStack to provide and
maintain a fully fledged and featured router distribution in its
provided virtual router. It's an admirable project to have if we can
get support for it. My guess is there's a bit of a disconnect in
interest though, because many (but not all) enterprises who want
CloudStack for infrastructure automation are skeptical about a VM as
software router and prefer to bring in aforementioned enterprise
vendors who have their own plugins. People who provide cloud hosting
and other services tend to use the routers, but their interest in
enterprise level routing and redundancy varies greatly, and their
customers are designing their apps to be resilient to infrastructure
loss (e.g. most AWS customers). That's of course not entirely the
whole truth, as is evidenced by the work we are seeing on redundant
routers, but I do believe that's why we haven't seen these things from
the beginning. They just haven't been all that important to the target
customers, even though infrastructure engineers are used to providing
them.

So now comes my philosophy. In the end, I think the great thing about
open source communities is that if there's the right level of
interest, it will happen.  I'm the kind of person who feels a pang of
stress at the idea that something I work on can't be all things to all
people, but after building a hosting business over the last few years
I've begun to realize that it's really only practical to try to be
good for a subset of the market and focus on that. You'll never please
everyone, there are limits to what you can accomplish, and sometimes
it's OK to just concede that your product is not going to work for
everyone. If you don't, you'll spread yourself too thin and fail
everyone. In order to make something great you have to have a limit on
your scope. That's not to say you don't listen to your customers, but
you sometimes have to make hard choices on who to listen to and who to
upset.

None of this should be taken as a discouragement to the topics at
hand, but again as someone to takes it personally when I don't deliver
I wanted to provide some follow up to address the "rant" and try to
provide perspective on why the things are the way they are.

On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Somesh Naidu  wrote:
> Adrian,
>
> Rant or not, I believe you have raised a valid point and reflect certain 
> group of peoples requirement.
>
> Based on your requirement, I believe you are looking for something like 
> Vyatta.
>
> Regards,
> Somesh
>
> -----Original Message-
> From: Adrian Lewis [mailto:adr...@alsiconsulting.co.uk]
> Sent: Fri

RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-21 Thread Somesh Naidu
Adrian,

Rant or not, I believe you have raised a valid point and reflect certain group 
of peoples requirement.

Based on your requirement, I believe you are looking for something like Vyatta. 

Regards,
Somesh

-Original Message-
From: Adrian Lewis [mailto:adr...@alsiconsulting.co.uk] 
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 8:50 PM
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

Tempted to suggest some sort of special interest group where networking
people can have some input into the dev process despite not necessarily
being able to produce any code themselves. As an example, Schuberg Philis
have recently done some great work on the redundant VPC VR but to a
network person, this sort of functionality is almost taken for granted
(please don't take this as a lack of appreciation). Similarly, the lack of
end-to-end QoS for applications running on ACS seems to me at least to be
a fairly significant oversight. ACS is known as having very flexible
networking compared with some of the alternatives but there does still
appear to be an enterprise focus on most elements that a 'typical'
developer (dare I say it, web developer) faces but more of a home network
approach to the networking side (aside from some pretty impressive niche
features).

We shouldn't need to rely on proprietary 3rd party products to provide a
similar level of versatility for networking in ACS in my opinion. It seems
bizarre to me that we have load balancing, distributed routing & ACLs with
the OVS controller, PVLANs for isolation,  etc, but yet still don't have
what I would consider basic functions such as better control over NAT,
firewalling, routing (no dynamic routing protocols at all), IPsec, having
to specify IP related attributes to what should simply be L2 constructs
(why does a VPC need to be given a CIDR?!?) etc. AWS had a similar issue
that lead to the VPC being introduced - enterprises consistently rejected
the weird and illogical way that they did networking back in the day that
was overly focussed on web/cloudy workloads.

This sounds like a rant and to an extent it is but I'd like to turn it
into a positive. I feel fairly helpless when the typical response to
feedback like this is that I should just contribute code. There are a
number of people that embrace the concept that the community should be a
collective of not just developers, but at the same time it's pretty
difficult to feel part of a community that's run almost uniquely by
developers; it's even a bit intimidating at times. I've seen too many
commercial companies that abandon innovation in favour of satisfying the
'large account' RFC/RFPs and in my opinion the same may apply to a project
driven largely by the needs of those that can contribute code.

To flip the concept on its head, it would be like a network guy creating
an amazing cloud orchestration platform but where you can only run centos
6 with a LAMP stack - yes this might work for a lot of people (and it
would likely only be adopted by those people) but for those that just want
to do something a bit different, it would be a fairly frustrating
experience.

Am I simply being a spoilt kid here or is there room for input that might
be constructive? Is there anyone here on the list with a networking focus
that can corroborate these concerns?

Adrian

-Original Message-
From: Somesh Naidu [mailto:somesh.na...@citrix.com]
Sent: 20 February 2015 18:31
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

I don't think we can. QoS in CS is mostly throttling traffic on the
virtual interface.

Regards,
Somesh


-Original Message-
From: len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com
[mailto:len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com]
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 5:18 AM
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

Hi All,

Does anyone know if it's possible to do network QoS in Cloudstack?  I
don't mean bandwidth limiting, but rather, prioritising different traffic
types for voice, etc.

Thanks
Len


RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-20 Thread Adrian Lewis
Tempted to suggest some sort of special interest group where networking
people can have some input into the dev process despite not necessarily
being able to produce any code themselves. As an example, Schuberg Philis
have recently done some great work on the redundant VPC VR but to a
network person, this sort of functionality is almost taken for granted
(please don't take this as a lack of appreciation). Similarly, the lack of
end-to-end QoS for applications running on ACS seems to me at least to be
a fairly significant oversight. ACS is known as having very flexible
networking compared with some of the alternatives but there does still
appear to be an enterprise focus on most elements that a 'typical'
developer (dare I say it, web developer) faces but more of a home network
approach to the networking side (aside from some pretty impressive niche
features).

We shouldn't need to rely on proprietary 3rd party products to provide a
similar level of versatility for networking in ACS in my opinion. It seems
bizarre to me that we have load balancing, distributed routing & ACLs with
the OVS controller, PVLANs for isolation,  etc, but yet still don't have
what I would consider basic functions such as better control over NAT,
firewalling, routing (no dynamic routing protocols at all), IPsec, having
to specify IP related attributes to what should simply be L2 constructs
(why does a VPC need to be given a CIDR?!?) etc. AWS had a similar issue
that lead to the VPC being introduced - enterprises consistently rejected
the weird and illogical way that they did networking back in the day that
was overly focussed on web/cloudy workloads.

This sounds like a rant and to an extent it is but I'd like to turn it
into a positive. I feel fairly helpless when the typical response to
feedback like this is that I should just contribute code. There are a
number of people that embrace the concept that the community should be a
collective of not just developers, but at the same time it's pretty
difficult to feel part of a community that's run almost uniquely by
developers; it's even a bit intimidating at times. I've seen too many
commercial companies that abandon innovation in favour of satisfying the
'large account' RFC/RFPs and in my opinion the same may apply to a project
driven largely by the needs of those that can contribute code.

To flip the concept on its head, it would be like a network guy creating
an amazing cloud orchestration platform but where you can only run centos
6 with a LAMP stack - yes this might work for a lot of people (and it
would likely only be adopted by those people) but for those that just want
to do something a bit different, it would be a fairly frustrating
experience.

Am I simply being a spoilt kid here or is there room for input that might
be constructive? Is there anyone here on the list with a networking focus
that can corroborate these concerns?

Adrian

-Original Message-
From: Somesh Naidu [mailto:somesh.na...@citrix.com]
Sent: 20 February 2015 18:31
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

I don't think we can. QoS in CS is mostly throttling traffic on the
virtual interface.

Regards,
Somesh


-Original Message-
From: len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com
[mailto:len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com]
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 5:18 AM
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

Hi All,

Does anyone know if it's possible to do network QoS in Cloudstack?  I
don't mean bandwidth limiting, but rather, prioritising different traffic
types for voice, etc.

Thanks
Len


RE: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-20 Thread Somesh Naidu
I don't think we can. QoS in CS is mostly throttling traffic on the virtual 
interface.

Regards,
Somesh


-Original Message-
From: len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com 
[mailto:len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 5:18 AM
To: users@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

Hi All,

Does anyone know if it's possible to do network QoS in Cloudstack?  I don't 
mean bandwidth limiting, but rather, prioritising different traffic types for 
voice, etc.

Thanks
Len



Network QoS (not bandwidth limiting)

2015-02-20 Thread len.bellem...@alternativenetworks.com
Hi All,

Does anyone know if it's possible to do network QoS in Cloudstack?  I don't 
mean bandwidth limiting, but rather, prioritising different traffic types for 
voice, etc.

Thanks
Len