[che-dev] Che community meeting 12 November: Meeting notes

[Dave Neary <dneary@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

The regularly scheduled Che community Meeting took place yesterday,
November 12th. Here are the notes. One agenda item (the future of Docker
as a deployment platform for Che) ran into the end of the meeting. If
you are interested in this topic, and were not able to attend or stay to
the end, please review the notes below and reply here.

The main part of the meeting was taken up with a presentation from
Computer Associates, a Broadcom company, about how they are using
Eclipse Che.

The next meeting will take place on November 26th, and we will discuss
the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools working group proposal, CheConf
18.2, and any other topics which are added to the agenda between now and
then.

Thanks,
Dave.

Community meeting minutes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18nHnwL6X6RfV_raC4HEWFAxSqk_nnf8HbfF7axuaY7k/edit#

* Community Spotlight: CA, a Broadcom company (Venkat and team)
  * CA acquisition by Broadcom has completed
  * The focus of Venkat’s team is DevOps for mainframe developers,
covering software configuration management, debuggers, fault analysis,
and CI/CD.
  * Mainframe organizations are evolving - digital transformation,
generational change in staff, with younger developers looking for modern
tooling, and requiring increased speed and flexibility
  * Coming from an Eclipse IDE background, a key challenge was
maintaining the IDE across 2000-2500 developers. By centralizing
environment, Che makes maintenance of deployed IDE easier and faster
 * Cloud based environment is easy to set up and maintain for
developers, but also through centralized deployment, easier to maintain
for admins too
  * Container support and some of the team-focussed features (shared
workspaces, modern development environment, LSP support) made Che very
attractive
  * The objective of the team was to offer a state-of-the-art
development environment, seamlessly integrated with mainframe tools, for
mainframe developers
  * Initial approach: Git integration with Endeavor SCM enables
developers to work in Git, and push to Endeavor to kick off build &
deploy; LSP support for COBOL, PL1, JCL, Assembler to support languages
mainframe devs use; Support for VSAM, IMS DB for data storage - question
to community: is it viable to create an LSP for data editing?
  * Debugger - enable remote debugging sessions from Che to the
Mainframe database
  * Main issues are currently updating plug-ins from Che 6 (GWT) to Che
7 (Theia)
  * We got a demo of the COBOL LSP + multi-machine stack based workspace
+ COBOL debugging via DAP for remote debugging in VS Code

* Docker as a deployment platform in Eclipse Che 7 (Mario)
  * Current status in Che 6: Deploy Che on Docker via Che CLI, on
Kubernetes via Helm chart, or on OpenShift via Minishift add-on and
deploy_che.sh
  * Che 7 introduces Workspace.next - web browser connects to wsmaster,
which manages a cluster of containers in a pod, instead of including
agents in a single workspace container
  * Che 7 workspaces are initially supported only on Kubernetes and
OpenShift. The Che team is looking for Docker deployment maintainers
Issues for existing team are the time requirement to maintain Docker
deployment
  * The Che team sees Che more as a Cloud IDE running on a cluster for a
team, rather than a local IDE. Running on Docker locally is easier, but
we see more value in Kubernetes for this use-case
  * Current workload:
    * Maintaining Che CLI
    * Workspace.NEXT implementation for Docker
    * Run and maintain CI to test Che on Docker deployment
    * Continued support of Docker APIs, which change frequently
  * Not about workspace recipes - we continue to support Dockerfile,
Docker images with Kubernetes Application Definitions, and Docker
composefile
  * General feedback from those on the call was that a focus on
Kubernetes as the primary platform matches community members’ usage

We unfortunately ran out of time, several participants dropped from the
call before this discussion started.

* CheConf 18.2

Dave shared on the call that we will be holding CheConf 18.2 on December
5th, more information on speaker line-up and schedule will be coming soon.

-- 
Dave Neary - Open Source and Standards team
Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +1-978-399-2182 / Cell: +1-978-799-3338