Open Stack

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 10:29 AM Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com>
wrote:

>
> We are consistently presented with the challenges of trying to convince
> our large community to change direction, collaborate across team
> boundaries, and work on features that require integration of several
> services. Other threads with candidate questions include discussions of
> some significant technical changes people would like to see in
> OpenStack's implementation. Taking one of those ideas, or one of your
> own idea, as inspiration, consider how you would make the change happen
> if it was your responsibility to do so.
>
> Which change management approaches that we have used unsuccessfully in
> the past did you expect to see work? Why do you think they failed?


I think there's two classes of approaches we've taken in the past: groups of
OpenStack developers with time dedicated to making the change, and
everything
else. Guess which one worked?

Whether we like it or not, this is a community of doers. We've seen lots of
working groups with good ideas talk and talk, and while they may be able to
convince people that their ideas are good, nothing gets done about them.

One other thing that I've noticed with larger changes, or changes that are
necessary to scale OpenStack, is that we often lack data or proper resources
to prove that a change helps things. This is improving with companies like
CERN or Vexxhost running closer to master and being able to deploy/test
changes easily at a reasonable scale, but still could be better.


>
> Which would you like to try again? How would you do things differently?
>
> What new suggestions do you have for addressing this recurring
> challenge?
>

For these large changes, what we really need is a group of people with the
time and resources to accomplish it. Finding that can be difficult.

I would like to try something similar to the "help wanted" list for large
cross-project changes that we want to see happen. Things like "remove
rabbit" or "proper pub-sub for everything" might go on that list (these are
examples, please don't look too hard into it). Maybe we need some number of
+1s from operators to get a thing on this list. From there, we can get a
small
group to gather data and propose solutions. The next step is to propose and
measure POCs of those solutions, but we'll probably need more
people/resources
for that. The TC/group can work together on messaging calls for help to
companies that have these problems, and hopefully get a group of developers
that can push forward and make things happen.

AIUI, the "help wanted" list hasn't been very successful in getting
contributors for those tasks. I think this proposal has a better chance of
succeeding as it would be solving needs present in all/most production
clouds. The things on the help needed list aren't pain points for many
deployed clouds, but fixing large cross-project problems would be.

I do realize it's hard to convince businesses to throw more money at
OpenStack
these days, so this might not work at all. But it's the best idea I have at
the moment. :)

// jim
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