A few questions around TopStack

[Klaus Schroiff]

Hi there,

I just had a brief look at TopStack - looks pretty interesting from a high level perspective.

May I ask a few questions around this ?

- first of all ... is this still an active project ? There didn't seem to be any substantial activities on GitHub during the recent months.

- I understand that TopStack is meant for 'private cloud usage' - thus for a single tenant, right ? It is not a multi-tenant platform ?

- is there a concept of  platform lifecycle ? Thus what about platform updates & upgrades over time ?

- Based on the code that I have seen, you are essentially providing an API compatibility layer plus service instantiatation on OpenStack via Chef recipes using commodity middlewares (MySQL, HAProxy, etc), right ?

- How do you manage service logging ? 

- How do you manage the service life cycle (e.g. patching of the MySQL instance landscape) ? 

Thanks

Klaus

[John Gardner]

Hi Klaus,

Thanks for checking out TopStack.

Yes, it's still an active project.  The core team has been working on some sister projects as well, but we will continue to support and enhance TopStack.

TopStack is currently largely single tenant.  Multiple private clouds can be configured, and user accounts can be assigned to particular clouds, but there's no support for handling large numbers of tenants.

TopStack does not have built-in support for platform lifecycle.

You are correct; our services are implemented using custom Chef recipes and best of class open source solutions, instantiated as one or more VMs on OpenStack or the cloud of choice.

Service logging is sent to local filesystem by default.  You can, of course, plug in standard appenders to centralize logging or use logstash and the like. 

With respect to service lifecycle, our goal is AWS compatibility; we've got hooks in place for e.g. maintenance windows and such, but there is no service to perform upgrades, presently.

Cheers,

John