for discussion: Fedora OpenShift as an objective

[Matthew Miller]

Red Hat's OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS, for those following
the buzzwords) offering is starting to get industry momentum.¹ ² What's
more, there are only two major open source PaaS offerings³, and we
currently have neither of them in Fedora.

We used to have OpenShift v1, but when v2 came along, it was just too
difficult to keep all of the Ruby requirements in sync. (I remember
some kernel-related pain, too, but I'm kind of hazy — that was several
years ago.)

But now, there's a shiny new OpenShift v3, rewritten in Go. I'd like to
talk about (and eventually if enough people think this is a good idea,
officially propose) a 12-month (e.g, Fedora 24 and 25 cycle) initative
to better our relationship with OpenShift, in order to put Fedora in a
position of leadership in this important area of computing — and,
thinking bigger, to advance the state of open source in this area by
doing that.

Specifically (outcomes!⁴), I'd like to:

 - Have OpenShift Origin v3 packaged in Fedora, so users Fedora users
   can deploy it locally and we can use it in Fedora Infrastructure.

 - Establish good communication channels between Fedora userbase and
   upstream developers, so that PaaS innovators⁵ and maybe early
   adopters⁶ choose Fedora for their leading-edge deployments

 - Increase PaaS knowledge and skills in the Fedora contributor
   community. Possibly have an OpenShift Origin instance running in
   Fedora infrastructure for contributor community use.


I think this is something on the order of an Objective rather than just
a change/feature proposal because it's actually a rather tall order. On
the technical side, currently OpenShift can't be easily packaged
because it includes some 200+ Go libraries, and we don't even have
approved Go packaging guidelines. This probably means we'd be asking
for a very large bundling exception (note 'Active upstream Security
Team' as part of the justification). On the less technical but still
important side, I'd like to see related marketing and documentation,
and coordination with Fedora Atomic and the Fedora Cloud WG, and
possibly with Fedora Server as well (I know OpenShift node as server
role is already under some consideration).

Thoughts, comments, thrown vegetables?


Notes:

1. http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-cited-%E2%80%9Cvisionary%E2%80%9D-gartner-magic-quadrant-enterprise-application-platform-service-worldwide-openshift-online-offering
2. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608445/cloud-computing/review--openshift-shines-for-developers-and-ops.html
3. The other is CloudFoundry, which I'm sure is fine, but which is kind
    of.... out of ecosystem. (I don't think it even officially runs on
    CentOS.)
4. http://fedoramagazine.org/lets-talk-about-fedora-project-objectives/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
6. ibid.

Disclaimer with my red hat on: this isn't an official message from Red
Hat, and while other Red Hatters, including people involved in
OpenShift, are _interested_, there isn't a specific request from Red
Hat to do this.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader