Open Stack

Hi all,

I spoke with Carol on the phone earlier to try and clarify the situation but wanted to ensure my thoughts are recorded on the list as well. By way of background I currently facilitate the existing NFV sub team with the help of a couple of others (volunteers welcome!) which consists of people from service providers, network equipment providers, and OpenStack vendors interested in this space:

    https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/NFV

It's thus far been primarily focussed on identifying use cases/requirements for NFV, turning these into actionable OpenStack blueprints, and finally implementing these. This effort started in Atlanta, made some progress in Juno, and is now hoping to regroup in Paris to drive further improvements in Kilo.

> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: 	[User-committee] Telcom Working Group
> Date: 	Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:28:48 +0000
> From: 	Barrett, Carol L <carol.l.barrett at intel.com>
> To: 	user-committee at lists.openstack.org
> <user-committee at lists.openstack.org>
> 
> 
> 
> Hi All – I’m glad to see the interest in forming a Telco Work group. I’d
> like to propose a charter and scope as a starting point for discussion:
>  
> Charter (if one is already in development pls let me know):
> 
>   * Foster discussion amongst Telco users of OpenStack to share BKMs,
>     resolve issues, etc.
>   * Gather information on add’l features, functions, capabilities,
>     services needed to increase OpenStack deployments by Telco users and
>     engage OpenStack community developers to discuss/implement
>   * Understand business, market and ecosystem barriers to OpenStack
>     deployments and work with the community to create action plans to
>     address them.

As I may have indicated above I see (1) and (2) as largely being the combination of the efforts of the existing group and ETSI NFV (see https://wiki.openstack.org/w/images/c/c7/NFV%2814%29000154r2_NFV_LS_to_OpenStack.pdf for the latest copy of the OpenStack gap analysis provided by ETSI NFV). How other initiatives like OPNFV might fit into this is unknown but it seems like (3) is the item raised that is currently not directly addressed in the context of OpenStack at least by the Foundation, the Board, or community driven initiatives like the existing working group.

It's not immediately clear whether addressing this requires a completely new working group, and the inherent confusion from having two groups working in the same space in the same community or some way to address within the auspices of existing frameworks with some loose but defined coupling to the requirement identification and development activities occurring in the community.

> Scope:
> 
>   * Include the current NFV Work Group into this team bringing community
>     developers

It's important to note that it can't be assumed that developers from the existing community will necessarily follow, particularly if the effort is seen to be too marketing/business centric and a distraction from actually implementing the required functionality. Building a developer community around this space has been non-trivial precisely because of the gap between the marketing hype around NFV and the current realities of implementation. I understand the desire to make the marketing story more specific to OpenStack, but simply wanted to highlight that if there is one thing NFV can't be accused of it's not having enough marketing!

Certainly when I raised the topic in the weekly meeting on Wednesday there was some scepticism about any attempt to combine efforts here distracting from laying out design and implementation priorities for Kilo which is front and centre for the existing group. The reason I had raised it however remains valid, per some conversation on the community list it appears to be more difficult at this venue to informally obtain space for BoF style activities then it has been in the past.

In Atlanta we used one of the development pods but due to the number of interested parties this proved quite difficult to manage, it was also hard to identify exactly where we would be and what time until we were on the ground at the event. We got plenty of feedback that there was not enough notice for everyone to attend.

For this reason if there is consensus that there really does need to be a separate effort to address the marketing/business side of the coin I would still be interested in the idea of co-locating in the space scheduled for this working group on the Wednesday afternoon and effectively splitting the room. This would allow all of those interested in this space to attend a single venue, which we can get out in advance, and self select which area they are interested in assisting with.

Thanks,

Steve

>   * Create a Marketing/Business team in the work group to work on
>     messaging framework, customer whitepapers, reference architectures,
>     etc. This group could also interact with OPNFV, ETSI NFV and other
>     groups where there’s common interests.
>   * Create an Ecosystem team in the work group to develop the
>     Marketplace and create reference materials to support OpenStack
>     deployments
>
> Is there interest in meeting in Paris to kick-off this work group?
> Regards.
> Carol