The RDO project community provides vanilla RPM packages and mirrors for deploying OpenStack on the CentOS or RHEL linux distributions.

The packages provided by RDO can be deployed manually or through different OpenStack installers such as TripleO, Kolla, Packstack and Puppet-OpenStack. OpenStack-Ansible also relies on RDO for dependencies although it currently installs OpenStack projects from source.

At each OpenStack development cycle milestone, the RDO community holds a test day. This gives the opportunity to the greater community of OpenStack users, developers and operators to try out the latest and the greatest of OpenStack with people around to help on IRC in the #rdo channel.

Historically, these test days have invited participants to install, deploy and configure a cloud of their own and report feedback (good or bad!). This feedback allows us to find issues in RDO packaging but also, where appropriate, to collaborate with the upstream OpenStack projects to file and resolve bugs that may have been found throughout the event.

This approach has a fairly high barrier to entry, however, the participants need to:

• Have hardware available to install and deploy on
• Be reasonably knowledgeable because they’ll be installing OpenStack
• Have the time to go through an end-to-end installation, test it and then provide feedback

A new experiment

This time around, we’d like to do an experiment to lower the barrier to participate in the test day and eliminating the three challenges I mentioned.

We’ll try and do that by providing a ready-to-use cloud environment.

You might have heard about TryStack which allows you to try OpenStack for free. This will basically be the same thing, except this is against the very latest of the release currently being developed and only for the duration of the test days.

Come try a real OpenStack Queens deployment

Would you like to participate ? It would be great to have you with us !

The final date for the upcoming test days has not yet been announced. The OpenStack Queens M2 milestone is scheduled to happen the week of December 04th 2017. We typically host two test days the week after a milestone has been reached. This means we are looking at scheduling them during the week of December 11th.

You can stay up to date the announcements by following @RDOCommunity or by subscribing to our users mailing list.

We also have weekly public meetings every Wednesday at 3PM UTC on IRC in #rdo.

The logistics of the test days are always discussed before they are announced and it’s another way to keep up with what is going on.

Signing up

We have an etherpad collaborative document where you can get documentation on what the cloud deployment looks like as well as how to participate.

You can find this etherpad here: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/rdo-queens-m2-cloud.

See you soon !