Leadership in Software Development Part 1

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I’ve been in and out of leadership roles from High School onward. For the past decade and a half, I’ve been a professional software developer. During that time, I’ve been in a leadership position roughly a third of the time. Recently, I was asked to evaluate my Leadership Philosophy (more on that later). I’ve also had to do the annual counselling that My company formalizes.

One tool we learned in the Army was the list of Leadership principals. As part of my evaluation, I want to see how I think they apply to what I do: Software Development in an Open Source project space. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

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Admin

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While I tend to play up bug 968696 for dramatic effect, the reality is we have a logical contradiction on what we mean by ‘admin’ when talking about RBAC.

In early iterations of OpenStack, roles were global. This is reflected in many of the Policy checks that only look for the global role. However, prior to the Keystone-Light rewrite, role assignments became scoped to tenants. This shows up in the Keystone git history. As this pattern got established, some people wrote policy checks that assert:

role==admin and tenant_id=resource.tenant_id

This contradicts the global-ness of the admin roles. If I assign

(‘joeuser’, ‘admin’,’mytenant’)

I’ve just granted them the ability to perform all of the admin operations.

Thus, today we have a situation where, unless the user rewrites the default policy, they have to only assign the role admins to users that are trusted to be admins on the whole deployment.

We have a few choices.
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Ossipee

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OpenStack is a big distributed system. FreeIPA is designed for security in distributed system. In order to develop and test each of them, separately or together, I need a distributed system. Virtualization has been a key technology for making this kind of work possible. OpenStack is great of managing virtualization. Added to that is the benefits found when we “fly our own airplanes.” Thus, I am using OpenStack to develop OpenStack.

Steve Okay took this while waiting for a flight to LAS

Early to Rise
757-200 lifts off Rwy 1 at SFO at sunrise. Credit Steve Okay. Used With Permission

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Template for a KeystoneV3.rc

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If you are moving from Keystone v2 to v3 call, you need more variables in your environment. Here is a template for an update keystone.rc for V3, in jinja format:

export OS_AUTH_URL=http://{{ keystone_hostname }}:5000/v3
export OS_USERNAME={{ username }}
export OS_PASSWORD={{ password }}
export OS_USER_DOMAIN_NAME=Default
export OS_PROJECT_DOMAIN_NAME=Default
export OS_PROJECT_NAME={{ project_name }}
export OS_IDENTITY_API_VERSION=3

Getting a Keystone Token in Rust

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Python is a great language, but sometimes I miss type safety. While I was always comfortable with C++, I know that the lanugague has it’s warts. Lately, I’ve been taking an interest in Rust, which seems to be set to address many of the shortcomiings of C++. What better way to learn it than to try and use on problems I already know well; OpenStack and Keystone? So, I wrote my first non-trivial program, which gets a Keystone token.

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