Dear OpenStack Community,
This note is to officially announce my candidacy for the OpenStack TC.
For those of you that don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself: [1] I have been active in the OpenStack Community since early in 2013. After nine years of working on Super Computing Solutions with IBM I moved to OpenStack and started working on Neutron (Quantum back in those days) before moving over to a relatively new project called Cinder. Within IBM I worked to create the processes for IBM’s storage driver development teams to interact with and contribute to the Cinder project. I became a core member of the Cinder team in the middle of 2013 and have remained active ever since. [2] [3] I have been the Cinder PTL for the last two years, starting in the Queens release.
Beyond Cinder I have sought opportunities to work across OpenStack projects. I was the liaison between the Cinder and Documentation teams. This lead to opportunities to learn how OpenStack’s documentation is developed and enabled me to help improve the Cinder team’s documentation. I have also served for quite some time as the liaison to the Oslo team.
Education and on-boarding of new team members has been a focus of my tenure in OpenStack. I started helping to lead the OpenStack Upstream Institute at the fall 2016 Summit in Barcelona. After Barcelona I helped to revise the education to meet the needs of future Upstream Institute sessions and have coordinated with my current employer, Lenovo, to sponsor each OpenStack Upstream Institute at Summits since the Spring 2017 Summit in Boston. Lenovo will even be hosting the OUI session in Shanghai! I also created Cinder’s on-boarding education which I have presented at each Summit since the Fall 2017 Summit in Sydney. I have sought opportunities to mentor new contributors both within my employers and from the community in general.
I have a long experience working with OpenStack and a broad understanding of how the community works, I also feel that I have a breadth of technical experience that will benefit the TC. I have experience in High Performance Computing and feel I can understand and represent the needs of the HPC community. I have years of experience in the storage realm and can represent the unique concerns that storage vendors bring to OpenStack and the subsequent concerns that our OpenStack distributors have supporting OpenStack and its many drivers. Since moving from IBM to Lenovo my focus has changed from development of OpenStack to developing solutions that leverage OpenStack. I have enjoyed the opportunity to become a consumer of OpenStack as it has given me an opportunity to better understand the versatility and complexity of OpenStack. I have been working with customers with an interest in both telco applications, particularly where Edge computing is concerned, as well as enterprise customers. Given my latest work I feel that I am able to understand and represent many interests from the OpenStack community.
If elected to the TC here are some of the concerns that I would like to address:
* Ensure that we continue to improve our on-boarding and educational processes. The days where people are assigned to only work on OpenStack are gone. The easier we make it for people to successfully contribute to and leverage OpenStack, the more likely they will be to continue to contribute.
* Improve documentation of OpenStack and Project processes. There have been a lot of discussions lately regarding undocumented processes. There is a lot of tribal knowledge involved in OpenStack and this too makes it hard for new contributors to integrate. Improving the documentation/description of ‘how we build OpenStack’ is crucial.
* I would like the community as a whole to seek ways to make OpenStack more consumable by our users and distributors. I think the move to having longer lived stable branches has been a good step, but it has not resolved all the issues posed by customers that stay on older releases of OpenStack. The stable backport policies need to be readdressed to seek a solution that allows vendors to backport code for their customers, improving OpenStack’s usability without risking its stability.
* I would like to continue the work that has been started to increase the visibility of the TC’s contributions to OpenStack and increase the effort to have the TC be a resource to the whole community.
* I want to seek opportunities for OpenStack to continue to inter-operate with other cloud solutions. Virtualization is not the only cloud approach available and customers, very often, do not want just one solution or the other. OpenStack needs to continue to expand to address these concerns to remain vibrant and relevant.
I hope that the thoughts above have resonated with you and appreciate you considering me for a position on the Technical Committee. I am passionate about OpenStack and believe that we have a community like no other in the industry. It would be a great honor to represent this community in a new capacity.
Sincerely, Jay Bryant
[1] Foundation Profile: https://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/8348/jay-bryant [2] Reviews: https://www.stackalytics.com/?user_id=jsbryant [3] Commits: https://www.stackalytics.com/?user_id=jsbryant&metric=commits IRC (Freenode): jungleboyj