I'd like to announce my candidacy for Swift PTL. Within the Swift community, we have established traditions that ensure we move carefully, and with purpose. Somewhere out there, there is an out-of-date-node with data scribbled down in a legacy format that we must still make durable, or an old client written against a years-old version of Swift that continues to perform its business-critical function. By keeping these realities in mind, we have (out of necessity) featured rolling-upgrades since our first release. This is not to say that we must therefore move slowly (though we often do, particularly now that the hype wave has crested, crashed, and begun to ebb). Despite our conservatism, there are few signs of ossification: new use-cases and new workloads bring new demands, and Swift evolves to satisfy them with new features. We now approach a new transition: John, our long-serving PTL, is stepping down. I have no worries, however; the Swift community is accustomed to dealing with (and thinking in terms of) an array of mostly-independent actors, working to improve the state of the system. The Swift developers are among the best I've had the pleasure to work alongside, and I have no doubt that Swift will continue to improve. I believe the best way I can further that improvement is to serve as PTL; to listen to users; to engage with operators; to enable developers. We are working on great, ambitious projects: * Pete from Red Hat is driving us supporting Python 3. We've known for a while that this would be necessary; it's good to see it finally happening. * Alex and Romain from OVH are upstreaming their (already running in production!) alternate diskfile format to support small objects. * Clay at SwiftStack continues to make replication and reconstruction better. * Kazuhiro at NTT is reworking the object-expirer queue, turning it into a general task queue. There is a lot going on in Swift. I can't wait to see what we build. Tim Burke