Hi everyone, I want to run again for the OpenStack technical committee for the upcoming cycle. I have been a long time operator of OpenStack with a focus on never using a local for, which has resulted in my involvement with many different projects by making quality-of-life improvements for these services that can help other deployers. I've contributed and worked with different sizes of teams inside OpenStack.
From our big projects such as Nova to projects providing specific services such as Magnum and pretty much most deployments tools at this point.
On the operator side, I've helped run one of the longest-running OpenStack public clouds and many private clouds. I've also interacted with many other OpenStack operators that are not as involved in our community, which gives me a significant exposure to our operator story and what that looks like outside our community of known operators. I believe it's time now for me to start driving significant changes in our community to simplify the operator experience, and I think that should start from the technical committee. We're seeing the world evolve around us with new technologies, but we've remained relatively stable and stuck to our "known and trusted" stack. Operators have historically had a lot of frustrations with systems like RabbitMQ and their clustering issues, which end up making the OpenStack experience disappointing. There are many new ways of doing RPC, which we can leverage and help make it even easier to run OpenStack (things such as gRPC). We've also had a history of making it complicated to use containers to deploy OpenStack and historically refused to ship "official" containers. The OpenDev community has built our a step of tooling that can allow us to ship containers very quickly, with nothing more than a well written bindep.txt file and a simple multi-stage build. It's about time that we start having official images and easy ways to deploy OpenStack to reduce those barriers. We define OpenStack as a "cloud operating system." We struggle to deliver much more than the essential infrastructure components. The drive behind OpenStack was to allow people to get more than the necessary infrastructure components. Still, large amounts of different efforts lead us into complicated ways of having to wrangle VMs to run services. With popular container orchestrators and schedulers, OpenStack has a perfect platform to be able to launch those services. By setting up a proper framework, we can start delivering many services such as database as a service, memory store as a service, and so much more by building out Kubernetes operators. It also opens up a whole domain of possible contributors that can use those operators without OpenStack. In closing, I don't expect everyone to agree with all the different ideas I'm putting out. We may only drive just a few of them, or maybe none of them. However, I want to convince you that we need to change. I can understand they sound like big leaps, and they may seem uncomfortable. However, they are genuinely some of the things we need to do to continue to be relevant and put us at the leading edge of technology like we used to be years ago. Thank you for reading this. Regards, Mohammed