Open Stack

Hello! I have been the de-facto PTL for Manila from the conception of
the project up to now. Since Manila is an officially incubated OpenStack
program, I have the opportunity to run for election and hopefully become
the officially elected PTL for the Manila project.

I'm running because I feel that the vision of the Manila project is
still not achieved, even though we've made tremendous strides in the
last year, and I want to see the project mature and become part of
core OpenStack.

Some of you may remember the roots of the Manila project, when we
proposed shared file system management as an extension to the
then-nascent Cinder project during the Folsom release. It's taken a lot
of attempts and failures to arrive at the current Manila project, and
it's been an exciting and humbling journey, where along the way I've
had the opportunity to work with many great individuals.

My vision for the future of the Manila includes:
* Getting more integrated with the rest of OpenStack. We have Devstack,
  Tempest, and Horizon integration, and I'd like to get that code into
  the right places where it can be maintained. We also need to add Heat
  integration, and more complete documentation.
* Working with distributions on issues related to packaging and
  installation to make Manila as easy to use as possible. This includes
  work with Chef and Puppet.
* Making Manila usable in more environments. Manila's design center has
  been large-scale public clouds, but we haven't spent enough time on
  small/medium scale environments -- the kind the developers typically
  have and the kind that users typically start out with.
* Taking good ideas from the rest of OpenStack. We're a small team and
  we can't do everything ourselves. The OpenStack ecosystem is full of
  excellent technology and I want to make sure we take the best ideas
  and apply them to Manila. In particular, there are some features I'd
  like to copy from the Cinder project.
* A focus on quality. I want to make sure we keep test coverage high
  as we add new features, and increase test coverage on existing
  features. I also want to try to start vendor CI similar to what
  Cinder has.
* Lastly, I expect to work with vendors to get more drivers contributed
  to expand Manila's hardware support. I am very interested in
  smoothing out some of the networking complexities that make it
  difficult to write drivers today.

I hope you will support my candidacy so I can continue to lead Manila
towards eventual integration with OpenStack and realize my dream of
shared file system management in the cloud.

Thank you,
Ben Swartzlander
Manila PTL, NetApp Architect