OpenStack - Discussion on Cells

I have a partner who is still using OpenStack Newton.

I was asked to look into this, because OpenStack Newton is no longer supported by the OpenStack community; it has been End of Life'd (EOL).

OpenStack Ocata is still supported. I at one time set this up, and I didn't see any notable differences between Ocata and Newton, and my Service Orchestrator (Open Baton) seemed to still work with Ocata.

Ocata introduces the concept of Cells. Cells is an architecture concept that apparently (if I understand correctly), replaces (enhances?) the previous concept of Regions. It changes the way OpenStack is run, in terms of control and delegation of nodes and resources (Compute Node resources, specifically). It is a more hierarchical approach.

Here is a link on cells that I read to get this understanding: Discussion about OpenStack Cells

I didn't stop there, either. I read some more.

It turns out CERN (Particle Physics!? They run those Particle Accelerators and do stuff  more complex than anything I am writing about!?) - THEY are (I assume they still are) big on OpenStack. Tons of and tons of material on what CERN is doing. Architectures, Topologies, yada yada. I don't have time to read all of that.

But, I did read THIS article, on moving from Cells v1 to Cells v2. It told me all I  need to know. If you are using Cells, you need to jump over the Ocata release, and use Queens or later. Because more than half the OpenStack modules were deaf, dumb and blind as to the notion of what a Cell is. Obviously this causes problems.

So I guess the concept of a Cell is somewhat Beta, and partially supported in Ocata.

I guess you could move to Ocata in a small lab if you are not using Cells, and if the API remains a constant in conjunction with what happens to be leveraging it.

If anyone reads this, by all means feel free to correct and comment as necessary.