Open Stack

confirmed

On 04/01/2014 03:02 PM, John Griffith wrote:
> I'd like to announce my candidacy for the Block Storage (Cinder) PTL
> position.
> 
> I've been involved with OpenStack for about two and a half years now,
> starting out by trying to help with some things in Nova-Volumes and then
> with the help of a lot of great folks creating Cinder.  I have been the
> unofficial and official PTL for Cinder since its beginning, and I've been
> pretty passionate about the project, it's goals and it's evolution the
> entire time.
> 
> There are a lot of different views about what a PTL "does", some
> candidacies point out that it's not technical, others talk about delegation
> and management.  I think that every project is different, and a lot of the
> responsibility comes down to what sort of dedicated team of contributors
> you have working on the project.  The role of PTL has requirements that are
> well defined in item [1].  In addition however I think it's
> the responsibility to step in and fill in the gaps if and when needed.
>  This could be spending late nights debugging issues that slipped in to the
> gate and wreak havoc on our process, or picking up the bugs that nobody
> else wants to work on.  In my opinion the PTL is not only a Project Manager
> and an Ambassador, but he or she is also a sort of pinch hitter on the
> technical side.
> 
> Cinder has come a long way over the past year, not only the project, but
> the team itself.  The maturity and growth of the project is visible from
> the diverse group of dedicated folks we now have working on the project on
> a regular basis.  We have greatly increased our number of reviewers as well
> as contributors and while it's sometimes challenging we've maintained our
> stance on API compatibility and feature implementation requirements for
> all drivers.  The review and contribution stats(here [2] and here [3]) are
> a clear indication that the project is actively growing and the work-load
> is becoming more and more evenly distributed.  I personally think Cinder is
> on the right track and the current direction is the right one to continue
> on.
> 
> All of that being said, there are still significant challenges ahead; the
> top items I see for the Juno release:
> * Maintaining driver compatibility
> We've always taken a hard stance on requiring all submitted drivers to meet
> a base set of requirements, this is extremely important for end users to
> ensure the promise of OpenStack is realized.  It's rather difficult to pool
> multiple block storage resources into a single virtual resource if some of
> them don't implement the expected functionality.
> 
> * Quality and Performance
> We've spent a good deal of effort on quality during the Icehouse release,
> but I think there's still a lot of work to be done here.  In addition I
> feel we should be starting to look at things like performance and
> scalability of the core project itself.  We haven't done a lot of focused
> work here in the past, and I think we should.
> 
> We also would benefit greatly from more in-depth testing being added to
> Tempest as part of the CI process.  In particular we don't have much of the
> scenario testing that's been introduced to some of the other projects to do
> more stress and large-scale type operations.
> 
> * Processes to test storage backends
> This has been somewhat controversial, but it really shouldn't be.  Once you
> strip away the rhetoric and the strong opinions, at the end of the day I
> would just like to see every driver in Cinder undergo and pass the same
> tests that every commit runs against the LVMiSCSI driver.  It doesn't have
> to be "everything" at once, but starting on this and getting data will help
> to make Cinder and OpenStack a much stronger and healthier project.
> 
> * Configuration and Management improvements
> This is something that has a lot of potential in my opinion.  Cinder isn't
> the most difficult project to set up and manage, however it does have a
> daunting number of options, and ever growing number of choices in
> components and many of them aren't well understood.  I'd like to see
> easier, more clear configuration options, the ability to do things like
> "plug and play" driver/backend addition etc.
> 
> * Tighter integration and collaboration with other OpenStack projects
> This is a big one in my opinion as the number of projects in OpenStack
> continues to grow at an exponential rate.  We as the Cinder team should do
> a much better job of tying in with other groups, not only the obvious like
> Nova, but also Ceilometer, Trove, Savannah and of course Horizon.
> 
> Our logging and exception handling also still needs a good deal of work.
>  I've spent a lot of time this release inspecting logs and debugging issues
> and I'm afraid we don't make things very easy for folks that are actually
> deploying OpenStack and trying to use the logs to debug issues.
> 
> I've had a few people approach me and ask if I thought it would be good if
> I were to "not" run;  in my case I still feel that I have a good deal to
> offer and I'd like to continue doing the work.  I'm relying more and more
> on other contributors in the community which makes a huge difference.
>  Every project is different, how it's run, how decisions are made etc.  In
> the case of Cinder, I don't think there's an uneven balance of decision
> making or direction planning in Cinder (in other words I think there's
> broad inclusion of multiple members); those responsibilities are shared
> well across the entire team which in my opinion makes all the difference in
> the world.
> 
> In summary, it's been an absolute privilege to serve as PTL for Cinder, I
> love the project and truly enjoy the work.  I'm hoping that others feel as
> though I've done a good job here and would like to see me continue in this
> role.  I realize that it's more and more common now for folks to step down
> as PTL after a couple of releases, it can be a stressful job and it's good
> to share the work-load.
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> [1]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/PTLguide
> [2]:
> http://stackalytics.com/?release=icehouse&metric=commits&project_type=openstack&module=cinder-group&company=&user_id=
> [3]:
> http://stackalytics.com/?release=icehouse&metric=marks&project_type=openstack&module=cinder-group&company=&user_id=
> 
> 
> 
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