Comment by kevin1024 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevin1024 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Jesse, I'm glad you're doing this. I love seeing the great people Rackspace is hiring and I'm excited about the improvements you could bring about.

I work for a Python shop that hosts everything on Rackspace. We have a mix of both dedicated servers and cloud servers, and we use cloud load balancers and Cloudfiles.

Here is my experience I had with Rackspace Cloudfiles and Python.

I started using a library I found on Rackspace's github, called python-cloudfiles (I contributed back some bugfixes to the library as well). One day, the project suddenly, without warning, disappeared from github! Where did it go! What happened? All my deploys are broken! Well, it turned out that it had been moved to another github account (rackerlabs) and support had been dropped, and it will be removed completely in August! I had to open a support ticket to figure out where it went. I wish there had been better communication here.

OK, so I started looking at Pyrax, which is the recommended replacement library (I think?). Looks pretty good, except it requires Python 2.7, and Rackspace only supports Centos6 (at least for dedicated servers), which has no official package for Python 2.7 (2.6 only). I could create a custom package to upgrade Python, but I find it kind of strange that Rackspace is providing a library that I can't run on their servers without adding custom packages.

Also, I noticed you recently added a commit to the python-cloudfiles package pointing to python-swiftclient. Is this an alternative to Pyrax? Can I use any of the openstack tools with Rackspace Cloud Servers / Cloud files? If so, should I build my apps on the openstack tools or on Pyrax?

Anyway, I hope you can clear some of this up.

So, I won't repeat what Ed said - the tl;dr is that pyrax should support Python 2.6, and your point about dedicated servers only supporting CentOS6 is something we need to consider.

As for the rest - yes. The communications and deprecation of python-cloudfiles was poorly handled. The crux of what happened is that python-cloudfiles was a part time project and ultimately superseded by the python-swiftclient work in OpenStack.

We have requirements that for an SDK / tool to be officially supported, we have dedicated full time headcount to support and maintain the package(s) - the decision was made to proceed with Pyrax which leverages python-swiftclient and other openstack tools under the covers as the official Python SDK for Rackspace.

This was not made clear to the users, or the community by any parties involved, and for that I apologize. We're continually working on better upstream communication/collaboration and this series of events (you're not the first to give us this feedback) has made us take a very hard look internally on how this is all managed and communicated.

The good news is that Ed - our current Pyrax SDK maintainer is full time and dedicated to working with you and others on pyrax - this means the Python 2.6 support will be taken care of.

Tangentially: Yes - python-novaclient and python-swiftclient from OpenStack will work on Rackspace Cloud - you can actually look at the Pyrax source to see that it uses these under the covers. Rackspace runs OpenStack with as few differences as possible so OpenStack tools should work great on Rackspace.

So, in short: I apologize. The communications and management of this to upstream (the community) were poor, and we are renewing all of our efforts to focus on upstream first.

Jesse

Thanks for the classy response! I'm excited that you have a paid maintainer for Pyrax and are willing to consider python 2.6 support. Things are looking good for the future.

Hi, I'm not Jesse, but I work with him, and maintain pyrax. I have only done some basic testing with 2.6, and everything appears to work correctly. I have also not used any of the new features of the 2.7.x versions of Python.

I would encourage you to try using pyrax with 2.6, and if you do run into any problems, please file an issue on GitHub and I will address it. We are ramping up our testing capabilities, and adding testing under 2.6.x is in the plans.

Hi Ed,

Pleased to meet you. I may be in communication soon regarding the results of my testing with python2.6 + Pyrax.

Awesome! Either post an issue to GitHub, or for general questions, etc., write me at ed.leafe@rackspace.com.

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