[Rdo-list] Does RDO have a branding problem ?

[Sandro Mathys]

While I have some insights into the RDO project and used to be an
active operator and contributor, I couldn't follow it closely anymore
in the past ~2 years - so I hope to offer kind of an outsider's view,
even though it's an educated one (i.e. first time quickstart users are
most likely even less informed).

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 2:01 AM, David Moreau Simard <dms at redhat.com> wrote:
> This email has been on my mind for a while...
> Recently, we dropped the "RDO Manager" branding in favor of calling it
> like it is, Triple O [1]. Good.

That's good, because it confused people who were (even just vaguely)
familiar with TripleO before. However, it doesn't help people who
don't know / understand what TripleO is. Honestly, I long thought that
TripleO is just a mode of operation, not an installer, i.e. you'd use
any installer out there and just like you can say "use Swift" or "use
Ceph" for object storage, you could say "set up plain OpenStack" or
"set up TripleO". (And I thought RDO Manager was one such installer
until shortly before that name was dropped).

> On various IRC channels, mailing lists, or websites I will see things
> like these (names removed but trust me, actual logs from today) on a
> pretty regular basis:
>
> - Hello everyone, can anyone advice how to add compute node with
> single NIC after setup openstack by RDO?
> - i'm new around here and just started to use rdo to deploy openstack
> i cannot seem to find one thing, is there a way to skip installing
> compute nodes services?
>
> Even some people I consider knowledgeable in OpenStack development or
> operations (but deploy using either home-grown packages or UCA, for
> example) believe RDO is some sort of installer by Red Hat.

Well, it sort of is, isn't it? On one hand, RDO produces packages and
they use these packages to install OpenStack. On the other hand, RDO
also produces two OpenStack installers, doesn't it? Of course, saying
"I installed OpenStack by RDO" is not technically fully correct, but
it's a fair simplification. And it's easily understood, isn't it? They
used any of the methods to install OpenStack that are produced by the
RDO community.

Of course, in a support case, you need to know which installer they
used, so them putting it simple isn't helpful, but that doesn't make
it wrong. They're probably not aware that they're unclear, i.e. they
might think there's only one way to install it - so we might need to
clarify that a bit more.

> Do we need to reinforce that RDO is a packaging effort to provide
> packages for Red Hat based distributions ?
> I mean, I don't know how we can put this message up front more than it
> already is, it's pretty big enough on the front page of the website
> [2].

Well, people might or might not be aware that RDO is a packaging
effort (it could easily be taken as a CentOS packaging effort, I guess
- but the CentOS Cloud SIG is pretty much driven by RDO and packages
are put into CentOS repos, so that's a fair misunderstanding). I don't
think there's a problem, or that any measures need to be taken to make
people better aware of this fact - unless we don't want CentOS to get
all the credit (but then why put packages in their repos, etc.)

> There is an important nuance between what RDO is and the installers
> that consume the RDO packages are.
> You can install OpenStack using RDO packages by hand [3] and the
> multiple different installers.

Exactly. And I think that's where the issue is (if there is any at all
- but I'd agree on this one): people don't know that there's several
ways to install OpenStack from RDO packages. I think this should be
pointed out more clearly, including what methods there are and how
they differ. In general, it seems rather hard to figure out that
Packstack and TripleO are different things, that both are installers,
how they differ and when either should be used. That there's other
methods (by hand, by puppet-openstack, by openstack-ansible, ...) is
probably even harder to find out, but might be out of scope.

I know, both Packstack and TripleO have a "homepage" on the OpenStack
wiki, and that sort of does explain this a bit. But I think this
information should be easily accessible from the RDO project homepage
and be easier to digest than those wiki pages. A table or similar
comparing them would be super helpful. Right now, this isn't just
missing from the homepage, I also can't easily find this information
it in the RDO docs.

-- Sandro