Open Stack

Sorry for the cross-posting, but I think this could interest operators too.

Dear community,

Starting at the end of this month, I won't be able to work full time
on OpenStack-Ansible anymore.

I want to highlight the following:
Our current way of working is not sustainable in the long run, as a lot
of work (and therefore pressure) is concentrated on a few individuals.

I managed to get more people working on some parts of our code
(becoming cores on specific areas of knowledge, like mbuil on
networking, mnaser and gokhan on telemetry, johnsom on octavia,
mugsie on designate), but at the same time we have lost a
core reviewer on all our code base (mhayden).

I like the fact we are still innovating with our own deployment tooling,
bringing more features in, changing the deployment models to be always
more stable, more user-friendly.

But new features aren't all. We need people actively looking at the
quality of existing deliverables. We need to stretch those
responsibilities to more people.

I would be very happy if some people using OpenStack-Ansible
would help on:

* Bugs. We are reaching an all-time high amount of bugs pending.
  We need people actively cleaning those. We need someone to
  organize a bug smash. We need people willing to lead the bug
  triage process too.
* Releases. Our current release process is manual. People
  interested by how releases are handled should step in there
  (for example, what does in, and at what time).
  We also need to coordinate with the releases
  team, and improve our way to release.
* Jobs/state monitoring. I have spent an insane amount of time
  cleaning up after other people. That cannot be done any longer.
  If you're breaking a job, whether it's part of the
  openstack-ansible gates or not, you should be fixing it.
  Even if it's a non-voting job, or a periodic job.
  I'd like everyone to monitor our zuul dashboard, and take
  action based on that. When queens was close to release,
  everything job was green on the zuul dashboard. I did an
  experiment of 1 month without me fixing the upgrade jobs,
  and guess what: ALL (or almost ALL) the upgrade jobs are
  now broken. Please monitor [1] and actively help fixing
  the jobs. Remember, if everyone works on this, it would
  give a great feedback to new users, and it becomes a
  virtuous cycle.
* Reduce technical debt. We have so many variables, so many
  remnants of the past. This cycle is planned to be a
  cleanup. Let's simplify all of this, making sure the
  deployment of openstack with openstack-ansible ends
  up with a system KISS.
* Increasing voting test coverage. We need more code
  paths tested and we need those code path preventing
  bad patches to merge. It makes the reduction of
  technical debt easier.

Really thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,
Jean-Philippe (evrardjp)

[1]: http://zuul.openstack.org/builds.html?pipeline=periodic&project=openstack%2Fopenstack-ansible