Open Stack

I would like to propose my candidacy for the Neutron PTL.

If you are reading this and you know me, then you probably know what I have
been up to up until now, what I have done for the project, and what I may
continue to do. If you do not know me, and you are still interested in
reading, then I will try not bore you.

As member of this project, I have been involved with it since the early
days, and I have served as core developer since Havana. If you are
wondering whether I am partially to blame for the issues that affect
Neutron, well you may have a point, but keep reading...

I believe that Neutron itself is a unique project and as such has unique
challenges. We have grown tremendously mostly propelled by a highly
opinionated vendor perspective. This has caused us some problems and we set
foot a cycle or so ago to fix these, but at the same time stay true to the
nature of our mission: define logical abstractions, and related
implementations to provide on-demand, cloud oriented networking services.

As any other project in OpenStack, we are software and we mostly implement
'stuff' in software, and because of that we are prone to all the issues
that a software project may have. To this aim, going forward I would like
us to improve the following:


   - Stability is the priority: new features are important, but complete
   and well tested existing features are more important; we gotta figure out a
   way to bring the number of bugs down to a manageable number, just like
   nations are asked to keep their sovereign debt below a certain healthy
   threshold.
   - Narrow the focus: now that the Neutron 'stadium' is here with us,
   external plugins and drivers can integrate with Neutron in a loosely
   manner, giving the core the opportunity to be more razor focus at getting
   better at what we do: logical abstractions and pluggability.
   - Consistency is paramount: having grown the review team drastically
   over the past cycle, it is easy to skew quality in one area over an other.
   We need to start defining common development and reviewer practices so
   that, even though we deal are made of many sub-projects and modules, we
   operate, feel and look like one...just like OpenStack :)
   - Define long term strategy: we need to have an idea where Neutron start
   and where Neutron end. At some point, this project will reach enough
   maturity where we feel like we are 'done' and that's okay. Some of us will
   move on to the next big thing.
   - Keep developers and reviewers _aware_: we all have to work
   collectively towards a common set of goals, defined by the release cycle.
   We will have to learn to push back on _random_ forces that keep distracting
   us.
   - I would like to promote a 'you merge it, you own it' type of
   mentality: even though we are pretty good at it already, we need a better
   balance between reviews and contributions. If you bless a patch, you got to
   be prepared to dive into the issues that it may potentially causes. If you
   bless a patch, you got to be prepared to improve the code around it, and so
   on. You will be a better reviewer if you learn to live with the pain of
   your mistakes. This is he only way to establish a virtuous cycle where
   quality improves time over time.

And last but not least:


   - Improve the relationships with other projects: Nova and QA primarily.
   We should allocate enough bandwidth to address integration issues with Nova
   and the other emerging projects, so that we stay plugged with them. QA is
   also paramount so that no-one is gonna hate us because we send the gate
   belly up. As for nova-network, I must admit I am highly skeptical by now:
   if our community were a commercial enterprise trying to solve that problem
   we would have ran out of money long time ago. We tried time and time again
   to crack this nut open, and even though we made progress in a number of
   areas, we haven't really budged where some people felt it mattered. We need
   to recognize that the problem is not just technical...it is social; no-one,
   starting from the developers and the employers behind them, seems to be
   genuinely concerned with the need of making nova-network a thing of the
   past. They have other priorities, they are chasing new customers, they want
   to disrupt Amazon. None of this nova-network deprecation drama fits with
   their agendas and furthermore, even if we found non-corporate sponsored
   developers willing to work on it, let's face it migration is a problem that
   is really not that interesting to solve. So where do we go from here? I do
   not have a clear answer yet. However, I think we all agree that the Neutron
   team wants to make Neutron a better product, more aligned with the needs of
   our users, but we must recognize that _better_ does not mean *like*
   nova-network, because the two products are not the same and they never will
   be.

Ok, now that you read this, you are ready to know whether you may want to
vote for me. Having said that, if you think that I am doing a fine job as
core reviewer, you trust my technical in-depth contribution, and you're
worried that my PTL duties may take that away from you...exercise your vote
right!

Thanks for reading and forgive the typos!

Armando Migliaccio (aka armax)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20150915/dc88b4c5/attachment.html>