I Don’t Think This Means What You Think It Means: Red Herrings in OpenStack

A breakout session by Florian Haas at OpenInfra Days Nordics 2019.

OpenStack’s complexity comes with operational challenges. And in situations where OpenStack misbehaves, it is frequently non-trivial to find the actual cause of an issue. This talk includes several examples of red herrings in OpenStack, and suggestions for spotting and avoiding them.

When working with OpenStack, you deal with an environment that is inherently complex. As with all complex environments, things sometimes go wrong or behave unexpectedly. And when that happens, your immediate goal is to locate, pinpoint, and then troubleshoot the issue.

And then, sometimes, you go down the dead-wrong path, and end up chasing a red herring for some time, before you find the real problem. This talk contains examples of such red herrings, enabling you to recognize and avoid them.

This talk is both for those who run an OpenStack cloud, and those who consume its functionality as a service. It talks about both red herrings in OpenStack operations, and red herrings in operating applications on OpenStack.

OpenInfra Days Nordics,OpenInfra,Open Infrastructure,open source,openstack,cloud,Florian Haas,