[openstack-dev] [election][tc] TC Candidacy for Shamail Tahir

Shamail Tahir itzshamail at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 21:16:48 UTC 2016


Hi everyone,

I would like to announce my candidacy for OpenStack Technical Committee
member for the upcoming term.

I am currently an offering manager for OpenStack initiatives at IBM and I
have been involved in the OpenStack community since 2013.  I spend most of
my time[1] in our working groups including the Product, Enterprise,
Application Ecosystem, and Operator Tags team..  I have also spent a lot of
time talking with OpenStack users and organizations that are new to
open-source and OpenStack in order to help them with their journey into
becoming community members.  The OpenStack project continues to gain
adoption while also expanding in scope with new projects and
functionality.  These changes continue to make considering operator and
user experience in strategic and architectural decisions ever more
critical.  Furthermore, the TC itself is involved in a set of broad topics
lately (such as changing the mission statement, diversity, and mentoring to
name a few) and additional perspectives will be good for these discussions.

If elected to be a TC, I would like to focus/highlight on the topics
outlined below:

   * Revisit big-tent workflow for new projects.

        - The big tent initiative has promoted faster and broader
innovation inside the OpenStack community and I believe we should reflect
on its first year to build a new set of best practices for both acceptance
and on-boarding new projects along with mechanisms to validate that new
projects are continuing to follow the four opens.  What worked? What
didn't?  Should there be additional criteria based on overall fit/need? And
how can we improve this further?



  * Promote a systems architecture point-of-view of the OpenStack cloud
platform

        - There are several initiatives under-way (with more to come) that
can benefit multiple OpenStack projects.  Cross project specifications
allow us to build best practices and guidelines but they are currently
treated as recommendations.  If we could develop a way to make some of the
more critical needs a requirement vs. recommendation then we could have a
way to ensure that we have a way inside the community to drive
architectural changes, as necessary, for better system stability, user
experience, or performance.  The other benefit would be to agree on common
needs (e.g. the quota service discussion happening right now, the online
schema migration work that has taken place in a lot of projects) and guide
new projects through adopting the changes as they start development rather
than retrofit.

   * Increase user and technical committee exchanges

       - I would like to propose a regular cadence to discussions between
the technical and user committee members so that technical direction, and
decision points, can be shared and we could strengthen/expedite feedback
from our user community into process as needed.  I have seen both parties
appreciate the dialogue and find it valuable, therefore I think anything
that can strengthen this feedback loop is a positive thing.

   * Building an ecosystem for next-generation platforms

       - Over the last couple of years there have been multiple
complementary open-source projects/technologies that are catering to
similar application design patterns (Mesos, k8s, Cloud Foundry, etc,).  I
believe projects such as Kuryr are doing a good job in mapping OpenStack
technologies like neutron to other ecosystems (e.g Docker libnetwork) and
we should continue to solicit more projects/activity that will help
customers/users build an internal platform that meets their objectives as
they shift from traditional applications to newer applications.  In the
end, we are all trying to meet user needs and the answer probably lies in a
complementary view of adjacent technologies versus every need being
implemented by a single platform.  A successful approach to building an
ecosystem for OpenStack clouds could dramatically increase putting our code
to work through an even greater adoption rate and make OpenStack clouds
viable for additional workloads/use-cases.

My reason for focusing on these topics is based on my experience and
background in the OpenStack community.  I am a core member of the Product
working group[2], participate regularly in the ops-tags-team[3], help with
SuperuserTV[4], help with building the community-generated OpenStack
roadmap[5], and moderate sessions at ops-meetups.

I am passionate about the work our community produces and excited that it
has found relevance for so many people and organizations around the globe.
I would like to continue to do work that further strengthens the feedback
loop between the developers and consumers of our open-source cloud.  I
humbly ask for your vote to represent this need as a member of our
OpenStack Technical Committee.


[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:ItzShamail%2540gmail.com

[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ProductTeam

[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/ops-tags-team

[4] http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/section/superuser-tv

[5] http://www.openstack.org/software/roadmap/
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