JP,
If elected to the TC, I would like to see some focus on efficiency in our
overall CI system at the Openstack level. I have spent the last year working
with the Infra team. The majority of my focus has been on improving the CI
experience for our developers at my tiny scale for the things I can change.
The workload profile for our CI jobs differ greatly. Some eat every last drop
of memory they get, so don't eat any. Some jobs required significant amounts of
I/O and others barely touched the disk. I am sure this topic has been
discussed before, but I think it's worth looking at again.
We are armed with enough data to make some decisions on how to best use our
resources. We need to first analyze the data we have in what jobs run best on
what providers. If possible we could prefer that provider for a given workload.
While this will not add up to a significant speed up in the beginning, it could
give us the power to make the system as a whole run faster. If we can shave
just 30 seconds off every job we run by preferring the fastest provider for
that job, we could save significant amounts of cpu hours. This results in a
better overall experience for our team of developers.
This is not a light task, and it would take a lot of work. It's also not
something that would happen overnight or probably even in a single cycle. But
it's worth the effort. Everything we do as a community is tested. Even minor
improvements to the CI system that does the testing results in big gains at
our scale. I would like to note that this isn't just an infra side issue. We
need everyone to ensure their jobs are being conscious of the resources we do
have. These resources aren't easy to come by and our infra team has done
nothing short of amazing work to date.
I don't have all of the answers to the technical questions, and I am not even
sure how the community would feel about this. But I think a focus on the gate
benefits everyone.
Thanks
Donny Davis