Open Stack

Fellow Stackers,

I just served a term as Manila PTL for Rocky and am writing to say 
that if you choose me I'd like to also take on that role for the Stein 
release cycle.

I think I've learned the mechanics now and can focus more energy on 
priorities.

Today manila itself is pretty solid.  It doesn't need lots of new 
features.  Back end vendors always want to expose new bells and 
whistles, and that's fine if they help with the review load and 
contribute to the community.  Reciprocity makes the world go around.

But I see the adoption curve for manila just now ramping up and my own 
focus will be to enable that by working to harden manila and to make 
it easier to use, both within and outside of openstack itself.

Manila offers file-shares as a service -- self-service, RWX, random 
access storage -- and abstracts over a variety of file-systems and 
sharing protocols.

Manila doesn't care if the consumers of the file systems live within 
openstack or not.  It's just a matter of network reachability and the 
access rights that manila manages.

Besides being able to run as one part of a full openstack deployment, 
manila can run on its own, with keystone to enable multi-tenancy, or 
completely standalone.

So I see manila as a true Open Infrastructure project.  It can turn a 
rack of unconfigured equipment into self-service shared file systems 
without limiting itself to the (very important) Virtual Private Server 
use case [1].

I will, accordingly, work to position manila as *the* open source 
solution for deploying RWX random access storage across data centers 
and across clouds.  To that end we need to:

 * get manila into generalized cloud providers like CSI [2]

 * get manila into the openstack sdk and openstack client

 * get more of the almost thirty manila back ends exposed in
   production-quality deployment tools like tripleo, kolla-*,
   and juju.

 * continue to fix bugs, improve our CI, run more stuff in gate with
   python 3

These are the things that will drive me if you choose me as manila PTL.

Thanks for listening,

-- Tom Barron (tbarron)

[1] https://www.zerobanana.com/archive/2018/07/17#openstack-layer-model-limitations

[2] https://github.com/container-storage-interface/spec/blob/master/spec.md