Open Stack

Hello all,

I'm announcing my candidacy for Manila PTL for the Liberty release.

I've been leading the Manila project since its inception back in 2013, 
and I'm excited and humbled by how much the community around the project 
has grown, especially during the last 6 months.

If you go back and read my ML post from my last nomination, I set out a 
number of goals [1]. I think we have achieved as a team everything on 
that list. In particular I am most excited by the growth of the 
community, which has exceeded my hopes.

Manila quality has come a long way, with greatly increased test 
coverage, and a significant number of bugs found a fixed. The primary 
technical goal for Kilo, which was to make Manila usable in a wider 
variety of deployment scenarios was met with our new 
driver_handle_share_servers config flag and multiple network plugin options.

The thing that caught me most by surprise was how popular the mid-cycle 
meetup was. I made the mistake of assuming that it would be a small 
group and that there wouldn't be interest in a physical meetup. The 
meetup was well attended and a lot of great ideas came out of it. I want 
to make sure we plan ahead for the Liberty meetup so people who are able 
to travel have time to make plans, and I'd like to make the agenda more 
formal next time around so people joining remotely can schedule their 
time more effectively.

I have a long list of technical content that I would like to see go into 
Liberty. The mid-cycle meetup added a bunch of new ideas, and there's 
still a big gap between what Manila can support and what Cinder (the 
project we forked from) now supports. I would like to catch up to 
Cinder, feature-wise, and also implement all of the 
shared-file-system-specific features we've been talking about but 
haven't gotten around to implementing yet (mount automation is a big one).

There is way more work than we can get done during a single release, but 
with a bigger team I'm hopeful that we can deliver more features in 
Liberty than ever before. To this end I've been trying to grow the core 
team, with 2 recent additions, and I hope to grow it more.

To address the concern that too many core team members are from a small 
number of companies, I'd like to propose a rule that changes require +2s 
from at least 2 companies, which should alleviate concerns about single 
companies shoving through unpopular changes, and I can also guarantee 
that the next core team nominations from me will be for people from 
companies not yet represented.

I wish I could include my proposed list of Liberty features here, but 
unfortunately it's too long and not baked enough because we haven't 
quite finished Kilo enough to move on to Liberty planning (for me at 
least). I want to continue the themes we started in Kilo of quality, 
simplicity, and integrating with the rest of OpenStack. Look forward to 
my list of proposed features in the coming weeks and let's make Liberty 
the best release of Manila ever!

[1] - 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-September/047045.html

-Ben Swartzlander