Open Stack

Hello all,

In the spirit of recent Technical Committee discussions I would like to bring
focus on how we're doing vendor driver discoverability. Today we're doing this
with the OpenStack Foundation marketplace [1] which is powered by the driverlog
project. In a nutshell, it is a big JSON file [2] that has information on which
vendor solutions are supported by which projects in which releases. This
information is then parsed to generate the marketplace so that users can
discover them. As discussed in previous TC meetings [3] we need to recognize
vendors that are trying to make great products work in OpenStack so that they
can be successful, which allows our community to be successful and healthy.

In the feedback I have received from various people in the community, some
didn’t know how it worked, and were unhappy that the projects themselves
weren’t owning this. I totally agree that project teams should own this and
should be encouraged to be involved in the reviews. Today that’s not happening.
I’d like to propose we come up with a way for the marketplace to be more
community-driven by the projects that are validating these solutions.

At the Barcelona Summit [4] we discussed ways to improve driverlog. Projects
like Nova have a support matrix of hypervisors in their in-tree documentation.
Various members of the Cinder project also expressed interest in using this
solution. It was suggested in the session that the marketplace should just link
to the projects' appropriate documentation. The problem with this solution is
the information is not presented in a consistent way across projects, as
driverlog does it today. We could accomplish this instead by using a parsable
format that is stored in each appropriate project's git repository. I'm
thinking of pretty much how driverlog works today, but broken up into
individual projects.

The marketplace can parse this information and present it in one place
consistently. Projects may also continue to parse this information in their own
documentation, and we can even write a common tool to do this. The way a vendor
is listed here is based on being validated by the project team itself. Keeping
things in the marketplace would also address the suggestions that came out of
the recent feedback we received from various driver maintainers [4].

The way validation works is completely up to the project team. In my research
as shown in the Summit etherpad [5] there's a clear trend in projects doing
continuous integration for validation. If we wanted to we could also have the
marketplace give the current CI results, which was also requested in the
feedback from driver maintainers.

I would like to volunteer in creating the initial files for each project with
what the marketplace says today.

[1] - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/drivers/
[2] - http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/driverlog/tree/etc/default_data.json
[3] - http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-01-10-20.01.log.html#l-106
[4] - http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-January/109855.html
[5] - https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/driverlog-validation

-- 
Mike Perez