Continuing our series "What Did You Do In Mitaka?", I spoke with David Moreau Simard.

(If the above player doesn’t work for you, please download the recording HERE.)

Rich: I’m speaking with David Moreau Simard, who is one of the engineers who works on RDO at Red Hat. Thanks for taking time to speak with me.

DMSimard: It’s a pleasure

R: What did you work on in Mitaka?

D: I’m part of the RDO engineering team at Red Hat. My role is mostly around continuous integration and making sure that RDO works. This means that some days I could be implementing new ways of testing RDO or some other days fixing bugs identified by our CI.

As far as Mitaka is concerned, we got Packstack to a point where it’s able to install and run Tempest against itself. This is awesome because it’s a great way to make sure everything works properly, sort of a sanity check.

This improvement allowed us to make Packstack gate against itself upstream to prevent regressions from merging by testing each commit. This was part of a plan to make Packstack part of our testing pipeline.

In Mitaka, we started using a new project called WeIRDO. It’s meant to use upstream gate integration tests inside our own RDO testing pipeline. We really improved our testing coverage in Mitaka with TripleO quickstart and WeIRDO. With WeIRDO, we’re able to easily test RDO trunk packages against Packstack and Puppet-OpenStack and the jobs that they provide.

We built a great relationship with projects that consume RDO packages throughout development cycles. We mutually benefit from essentially testing each other. So it makes a lot of sense to stay in touch with these guys.

Overall, I can really tell how the testing coverage for RDO has improved tremendously, even since liberty. Mitaka is really the best and most tested release of RDO yet. I want to extend my thanks to everyone that was involved in making it happen.

R: So how about in Newton? What do you think is coming in Newton for you?

D: So, Mitaka was already an awesome cycle from the perspective of testing coverage that we had for RDO. We want to keep working on that foundation to increase the coverage further. I also want to spend some time on improving monitoring and automation to make troubleshooting problems easier.

Trunk breaks all the time, and so it takes a lot of time to troublshoot that, and we want to make that easier. But also have visibility into the problems that could be coming.

Earlier I talked about WeIRDO and how we use upstream gate jobs in our testing pipeline. In Newton, we want to add Kolla back into our testing pipeline through WeIRDO. I had some issues getting Kolla to work reliably in Mitaka but they’ve fixed some problems upstream since then so we’ll take another look at it.

Just recently, there’s also the Chef OpenStack community — they’ve been working on integration testing their cookbooks in the gate. I’m definitely interested in seeing what they have, and possibly leveraging their work once they’re ready.

The other large chunk of work will probably come from our effort in streamlining and centralizing the different components of RDO. Right now, we’re a bit all over the place… But we’ve already started working towards moving to a software factory instance. Software factory is a project to provide upstream’s testing ecosystem with Git, Zuul, Nodepool, Gerrit and Jenkins.. but in a box, an appliance.

This will definitely make things easier for everyone since everything from RDO will be expected to be in this one place.

R: Thank you very much for your time.

D: I appreciate yours, and it was great working on this great release.

David is dmsimard on Twitter, github, and on IRC.