Open Stack

Thanks Randy and Michael for sharing your thoughts. Keep 'em coming.

I agree with Randy (quoting him below) that this group has the potential

> [...] to establish a process by which longer term vision and product
> direction can emerge from within the community. [...]
> 
In other words, this group should own the product strategy for OpenStack
as a whole.
> 
On Wed, 2014-12-24 at 18:43 -0800, Randy Bias wrote:

> OpenStack is at pretty significant risk of collapsing under it’s own
> weight.  As it is now, we’re on a suicide mission.  We’ve got dozens
> of inbound projects that all want to move into integrated status and
> the current development cadence calls for a 6-month “integrated
> release cycle” even though it’s questionable whether all components
> really need to be tested together every 6 months or even integrated
> for that matter.  Once we cross into 20+ projects this simply won’t be
> doable any more.  Either we’ll break down to an annual release cycle
> (a mistake) or we’ll fix what is a fundamentally flawed approach.
> 
The TC is concerned about this, too and has been discussing for weeks
now how to reshape the concept of an 'OpenStack release', what it means
to 'graduate' from incubation. Last week the TC approved a resolution
that lays the foundational work to break that vicious cycle of
integrating components that, as Randy says, don't need to be tested
together at each commit, or even 'integrated' at all. 

Thierry's post has more details http://ttx.re/the-way-forward.html and
this group is well positioned to keep contributing to the debate, which
is a very important and large change and will continue during all 2015. 

> And that goes to your last point there.  OpenStack’s vision in the
> early days was fairly focused on infrastructure, although it’s mission
> was stated around “cloud”, which is in the eye of the beholder. As an
> inclusive, meritocracy, we have drifted and given rise to a rapidly
> growing set of interrelated but NOT interdependent (with exceptions)
> projects which we are currently and unfortunately committed to
> delivering a single monolithic release of at a fixed interval.
> 
Exactly: in the early days there were only a couple of customers with
very specific use cases being targeted. It didn't take much for a huge
diverse set of 'personas' joining OpenStack, adopting it. The conflict
among them ('cloud', enterprise, NVF/Telco... just to name a few) is
high, rising fast and very visible from my observation deck. I would
expect this group to help reduce this conflictuality by being the one
that says "no" (or helps others say no).

> 
Happy end of year and wonderful beginning,
stef