<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class="">Hi,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">My name is Renat Akhmerov. I decided to run for Mistral PTL for Mitaka release cycle.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">This is the first time when I’m doing it officially after Mistral was accepted into Big Tent.</div><div class="">In fact, I’ve been driving the project for just a little less than 2 years by now and I've put a lot of</div><div class="">my energy into this initiative by designing its architecture, coding (including initial PoC versions),</div><div class="">reviewing nearly every single patch coming in and presenting Mistral at every conference that</div><div class="">I could including OpenStack summits. Of course, I wasn’t doing it alone and I couldn’t find enough</div><div class="">words to express how thankful I am to folks from Mirantis, StackStorm, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent,</div><div class="">HP, Ericsson and other companies. You all have done a great work and I’m proud to be a part of</div><div class="">such a great team.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Although a lot has been done and we certainly have achievements in the form of users who</div><div class="">use Mistral in production, there’s a lot more ahead. And below is what I think we need to focus on</div><div class="">during Mitaka cycle.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><b class="">HA and maturity</b></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">Making Mistral truly stable and mature technology capable of running in HA mode. I have to admit</div><div class="">that so far we haven’t been paying enough attention to high-load testing and tuning. And my belief</div><div class="">that it’s a high time we started doing it. Some of the issues are known to us and we know how we</div><div class="">should be fixing them. Some have to be discovered. In my opinion, what we’re missing now is a</div><div class="">comprehensive understanding of, believe it or not, how Mistral works :) This may sound strange,</div><div class="">but I really mean is that we need to know in very tiny detail how every Mistral transaction works</div><div class="">in terms of potential race conditions, isolation level, concurrency model etc. In my strong opinion,</div><div class="">this is a prerequisite for everything else. Having said that, I am going to bring more expertise</div><div class="">on the project to fill this gap: either by attracting corresponding people and by planning more</div><div class="">time for the current team members to work on that.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Apart from that I find it very important to stop developing two many new features in workflow engine</div><div class="">and do a proper refactoring of it. In my strong opinion, Mistral engine started suffering from</div><div class="">squeezing more and more functionality into it. It’s generally normal but I believe that we need to</div><div class="">simplify the code base by cleaning it up wisely and at the same time improving test coverage</div><div class="">accounting for all kind of corner cases and negative scenarios.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><b class="">Use cases</b></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">This is probably the most tricky part about this project and I believe I personally should have done</div><div class="">much better job of clearly explaining Mistral value for the industry. I plan to change the situation</div><div class="">drastically by providing battle proven scenarios where it’s hard or nearly impossible to avoid using</div><div class="">Mistral. Also recording screencasts and writing cookbooks is part of the plan.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><b class="">UI</b></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks to engineers from Huawei and Alcatel Lucent who’ve done a good job in Liberty to move Mistral</div><div class="">UI to a much better state. Most of basic CRUD functionality is there and this work keeps going on.</div><div class="">However, I still see a lot of ways how to advance Mistral UI and make it really remarkable.</div><div class="">For example, one specific thing that I’d really like to work on is workflow graph visualisation</div><div class="">(for both editing and monitoring running workflows).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I find it very important particularly because having good UI would help us to build even larger</div><div class="">community around the project. Just because it would be easier to deliver a message of what the</div><div class="">project goal is.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><b class="">What else</b></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">Other things that I’d like to pay attention to:</div><div class=""><ul class="MailOutline"><li class="">Solving guest VMs access problem</li><li class="">More intellectual task scheduling mechanism accounting for workflow priorities (FIFO but on workflow level)</li><li class="">New REST API (don’t confuse with DSL, or workflow language) on which we’ve almost agreed within the team</li><li class="">Improving significantly CLI so that it becomes truly convenient and fun to use</li></ul></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Eventually, my goal is to build a really useful and beautiful technology</div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Renat Akhmerov</div></div><div class=""><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><div class="">@ Mirantis Inc.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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