[ogb-discuss] Proposal for HA Clusters Community

[Nicholas Solter]

Hi Stephen,

Stephen Lau wrote:
> Hi Nicholas,
>     Thanks for the proposal, I have a few questions:
> 
> 1) Is it necessary that you have the community group setup before your 
> source code is available/published?  I only ask because I'm not entirely 
> comfortable with the idea of giving governance representation and voting 
> grants to a community that doesn't yet have open code or open development.
> 

I believe that currently under opensolaris every project needs a 
community. There don't seem to be any existing communities under which 
HA Cluster technology would fit. So, yes, I think we do need a community 
group before we can publish the source code. Please correct me if I'm 
misunderstanding the rules.

I promise that we will very soon have open code and open development -- 
but first we need the community to be approved to get things started :-)

> 2) What will the community's initial content be?  Will it be entirely 
> Sun Cluster focused, or will it be more generalised as the community 
> name suggests?

The initial content, as contributed from Sun, will be the source code 
for Solaris Cluster. However, see the answer to your next question.

> 
> 3) Similar to #2, but more generally: will your community 
> endorse/sponsor community work/projects focused on HA Clusters, but 
> involving non-Sun Cluster code?

Yes, we will definitely endorse and sponsor projects involving non-sun 
Cluster code. We have no intention of making this an exclusive Sun 
Cluster community.

> 
> 4) Do you have a plan for involving non-Sun employees (i.e.: 
> documentation, tutorials, code walk-throughs, etc.) to help bring them 
> up to speed with your development process and source code?

Yes. We certainly want to encourage non-Sun community involvement. We 
will provide the kinds of documentation you mention, specifically 
instructions for building the code, code walk-throughs, instructions for 
contributing, etc. Additionally, we are hoping to get a cluster 
presentation accepted for the Sun Tech Days OpenSolaris day for next 
year, and are planning to meet with various OpenSolaris user groups. And 
we are open to suggestions for any other efforts that we can undertake 
to help build a community.

Thanks,
Nick

> 
> I think those are all the questions I have for now, if anymore come to 
> mind - I'll let you know.  :)  Thanks!
> 
> cheers,
> steve
> 
> Nicholas Solter wrote:
>> Following is a proposal for an HA Clusters community on opensolaris.org.
>>
>> Name:
>>
>> “HA Clusters”
>>
>> Background:
>>
>> High-Availability (HA) Clusters are a class of tightly-coupled 
>> distributed systems that provide high availability of services through 
>> hardware and software monitoring and hardware redundancy. HA Clusters 
>> are often closely associated with the underlying operating system, and 
>> in many cases can be considered extensions of the OS. For example, 
>> approximately one half of the Solaris Cluster code runs in the Solaris 
>> kernel.
>>
>> Focus and Scope:
>>
>> The scope of the community will be implementations, ideas, 
>> innovations, and research around high-availability clusters on the 
>> OpenSolaris platform. This scope includes, but is not limited to, such 
>> areas as core technologies (eg. heartbeats, quorum, filesystems), 
>> APIs, system administration, application support code (agents), and 
>> test frameworks. Although the focus is on clusters for 
>> high-availability, as opposed to HPC clusters, grids, or other cluster 
>> technologies, we recognize that there is often overlap between the 
>> technologies for different kinds of clusters, and will not discourage 
>> fruitful conversations and projects as long as they relate to high 
>> availability.
>>
>> Initial Contributions:
>>
>> Sun Microsystems will contribute to the community the source code for 
>> Solaris Cluster, Sun's commercial HA Cluster product group, under the 
>> name “Open High Availability Cluster.” This contribution will start at 
>> the time of community formation with the Sun Cluster Agents source for 
>> a wide portfolio of applications. A Sun Cluster Agent provides the 
>> “glue” to allow an off-the-shelf application to run with 
>> high-availability on Sun Cluster software.
>>
>> Nominating Members:
>>
>> Bonnie Corwin
>> Sara Dornsife
>> Mike Kupfer
>> Liane Praza
>>
>> Initial Contributors (all from Sun Microsystems):
>>
>> Nicholas Solter
>> Suraj Verma
>> Jonathan Mellors
>> Prasad Dharmavaram
>> Swathi Devulapalli
>> Madhan Kumar Balasubramian
>> Venkat Chennuru
>> Subhadeep Sinha
>> Lisa Shepherd
>> Thelan Nguyen
>> Lingling Chyu
>> Sekhar Lakkapragada
>> Meenakshi Kaul-Basu
>> Thorsten Frueauf
>> Neil Garthwaite
>> Jatin Jhala
>> Tim Read
>> Detlef Ulherr
>> Bob Bart
>> Ashutosh Tripathi
>> Hemachandran Namachivayam
>>
>>
>> Initial Facilitator:
>>
>> Nicholas Solter
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nick
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> 
>