A while back I wrote about etcd-compute. It's a collection of Python that combines Placement, etcd, and libvirt to provide a very simple system for starting VMs on a collection of hosts. It started out as a non-working learning and exploration tool, but it keeps getting closer to something useful …

I've had a few persistent complaints in my four and half years of working on OpenStack, but two that stand out are:

• The use of RPC—with large complicated objects being passed around on a message bus—to make things happen. It's fragile, noisy, over-complicated, hard to manage, hard to …