Open Stack

Hi everyone,

This is to continue the discussion of the goal selection for the Stein release.
I had previously sent out a recap of our discussion at the Forum here:

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2018-May/130999.html

Now we need to actually narrow things down and pick a couple goals.

Strawman
========

Just to set a starting point for debate, I propose the following two as goals
for Stein:

- Cold Upgade Support
- Python 3 first

As a reminder of other ideas, here is the link to the backlog of goal ideas
we've kept so far:

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/community-goals

Feel free to add more to that list, and if you have been involved in any of the
things that have been completed there, please remove things you don't think
should still be there.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what we could or should do for goals.

With that, I'll go over the choices that I've proposed for the strawman.

Python 3 First
==============

One of the things brought up in the session was picking things that bring
excitement and are obvious benefits to deployers and users of OpenStack
services. While this one is maybe not as immediately obvious, I think this
is something that will end up helping deployers and also falls into the tech
debt reduction category that will help us move quicker long term.

Python 2 is going away soon, so I think we need something to help compel folks
to work on making sure we are ready to transition. This will also be a good
point to help switch the mindset over to Python 3 being the default used
everywhere, with our Python 2 compatibility being just to continue legacy
support.

Cold Upgrade Support
====================

The other suggestion in the Forum session related to upgrades was the addition
of "upgrade check" CLIs for each project, and I was tempted to suggest that as
my second strawman choice. For some projects that would be a very minimal or
NOOP check, so it would probably be easy to complete the goal. But ultimately
what I think would bring the most value would be the work on supporting cold
upgrade, even if it will be more of a stretch for some projects to accomplish.

Upgrades have been a major focus of discussion lately, especially as our
operators have been trying to get closer to the latest work upstream. This has
been an ongoing challenge.

There has also been a lot of talk about LTS releases. We've landed on fast
forward upgrade to get between several releases, but I think improving upgrades
eases the way both for easier and more frequent upgrades and also getting to
the point some day where maybe we can think about upgrading over several
releases to be able to do something like an LTS to LTS upgrade.

Neither one of these upgrade goals really has a clearly defined plan that
projects can pick up now and start working on, but I think with those involved
in these areas we should be able to come up with a perscriptive plan for
projects to follow.

And it would really move our fast forward upgrade story forward.

Next Steps
==========

I'm hoping with a strawman proposal we have a basis for debating the merits of
these and getting closer to being able to officially select Stein goals. We
still have some time, but I would like to avoid making late-cycle selections so
teams can start planning ahead for what will need to be done in Stein.

Please feel free to promote other ideas for goals. That would be a good way for
us to weigh the pro's and con's between these and whatever else you have in
mind. Then hopefully we can come to some consensus and work towards clearly
defining what needs to be done and getting things well documented for teams to
pick up as soon as they wrap up Rocky (or sooner).

---
Sean (smcginnis)