OpenStack Summit Tokyo (Oct 2015) vBrownBag Talk. There is a YouTube recording for this at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFXJYq_68Dk&feature=youtu.be.

1. OpenStack User Research:
What Have We Learnt?
Ju Lim, Red Hat
OpenStack UX (Core Team)
julim@redhat.com
julim on #openstack-ux
28 October 2015

2. Background
● A little about me
● A little about OpenStack UX
o Working to improve the overall OpenStack end-to-end experience
for operators, users, developers, etc.
o Members from across the community (EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Puppet
Labs, Rackspace, Red Hat)
● Getting involved
● Q&A

3. User Research: What Have We Done?
Focuses on understanding of user behaviors, needs, and motivations
through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback
methodologies to help inform user-centered design
Recent user research work by the OpenStack-UX team:
● Personas development based on user interviews (Oct 2015)
● Nova to Neutron migration interviews and survey (July - Sept 2015)
● Horizon Usability Testing on Launch Instance (Aug 2015)

4. Personas
A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral
patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products,
preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like. It can help inform design
decisions made during product development.
● OpenStack Personas Ecosystem
Personas help us design and
build correctly the first time
rather than spending the
same money or more with
multiple redesigns,
redevelopment, increased
customer support costs, etc.

5. Meet our Latest Personas
Collaboration amongst various organizations: HP, IBM, Intel,
RackSpace, Red Hat at the October 2015 Persona Workshop
(Etherpad)
Additional persona work on:
● Infrastructure Architect
● Service Administrator
● Cloud Operators
● Domain Administrator
● DevOps Engineer
Personas developed
based on interviews &
surveys of real users

11. Nova Network to Neutron Migration
● Help OpenStack community to understand the barriers with migrating from
Nova to Neutron and why people are not migrating
● Interviews conducted in July-August 2015, followed by Sept 2015 survey, to
ensure validation by larger community
● HP, Red Hat, and OpenStack Foundation collaborated on this investigation
● Nova Network use is decreasing -- currently 16% of OpenStack deployments
(October 2015 User Survey)
● Still a fair number of users with simple (flat) networking needs
● For simple networking needs, users prefer to stay with Nova as it meets a very
high majority of end-users’ needs

12. Main Reasons for Staying with Nova Network
● Concerns with complexity of migrating to Neutron
● Concerns with manageability and troubleshooting in Neutron
● Insufficient time and/or resources to migrate to Neutron
● Networking needs are already met by Nova Network
● Features that Neutron offers are not of interest/benefit to Nova Network
users
● Unsure which Neutron plug-in to deploy
● No plans to migrate to Neutron unless Nova Network is deprecated
● Concerns about Neutron stability
● Neutron does not scale as well as Nova Network

13. Nova Network to Neutron Migration Barriers
● Neutron scalability
● Concerns around feature parity and scalability with Nova Network
● The need that end-users have to setup Neutron virtual networks and
security groups as part of Launch Instance workflow
● Limited high availability for L3 agents
● Distributed virtual routing (DVR) limitations for environments with
limited IPv4 addresses
● Lack of ability to swap out plug-ins easily
● Limited scalability of security groups

14. Neutron Concerns Post-Nova Network Migration
● Neutron scalability
● Limited high availability for L3 agents
● Inability to share networks by subset of projects
● Inability to have Layer 2 domain scoped to a certain group of hosts, and be able
to define that in Neutron
● Limited scalability of security groups
● Limited high availability for LBaaS
● Lack of partitioning mechanism for cells
● Concerns with regard to IPAM support
● Inability to share security groups between projects

15. Neutron Concerns Post-Nova Network Migration
(contd.)
● Requires end users to setup virtual networks and security groups as part of
Launch Instance workflow
● Lack of ability to swap out plug-ins easily
● Distributed virtual routing (DVR) limitations for environments with limited IPv4
addresses
● Inability to specify primary IP for a host
● Inability to map multiple floating IPs to an instance
● Uses up more IP addresses vs. Nova Network
● Concerns around feature parity and scalability with Nova Network
More details at Neutron Migration Study.

16. Usability Testing
Horizon: Launch Instance Workflow validation (August 2015)
● Horizon Launch Instance Validation Scenario and Tasks
● Horizon Launch Instance Validation Issues

17. ● OpenStack UX Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/UX
● Mailing List: openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org with the (email) subject
using the tag [UX]
● IRC: #openstack-ux
● Bi-weekly Friday meetings @ 1500 UTC
○ https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/UX
More User Research Requests? More Info?

18. THE END