Hello Stackers, We're 9 weeks away from the date of the coordinated release of OpenStack 2026.1 "Gazpacho" [1]. In the past week, election officials set the dates for the combined election for Project Team Leads and for five seats on the OpenStack Technical Committee [2]. The nomination period begins at 23:45 UTC on February 04, 2026, and runs until 23:45 UTC on February 18, 2026. This may overlap with holiday periods around the world, so please feel free to submit your nominations early [3], and if you'd like, you could have someone else shepherd the nomination through in your absence. Official election updates will follow in a separate thread. Besides this, in the past week, the OpenStack-Ansible project team revived the os_watcher and os_freezer Ansible roles. There are several other governance updates that are undergoing the community's review. === Weekly Meeting === The TC hosted a weekly IRC meeting on January 20, 2026 [4]. We spent a significant amount of time discussing the future of our recommended web server stack, specifically regarding the eventual replacement of uWSGI. While uWSGI remains functional, its "maintenance mode" status and lack of HTTP/2 support are becoming bottlenecks for deployments. We discussed alternatives like Gunicorn and the Rust-based Granian, though the TC's primary goal here isn't to mandate a specific tool, but to clarify the distinction between CI convenience (DevStack-based testing) and production recommendations. Our high-level objective is to ensure that OpenStack services remain backend-agnostic (WSGI/ASGI compatible) while providing deployers with clear, updated documentation that reflects modern performance standards rather than legacy defaults. We also discussed adding a new community goal focused on supporting MariaDB/MySQL character set changes required by newer LTS releases of MariaDB. Doing this would drive consistency across services in maintaining database compatibility and stability. The next meeting of the OpenStack Technical Committee is today, January 27, 2026, at 1700 UTC. It will be hosted on the #openstack-tc IRC channel on OFTC. Please find the agenda on the meeting's wiki page [5]. I hope you'll be able to join us there. === Governance Proposals === ==== Merged ==== - Revive os_freezer role for OSA | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/973364 - Revive os_watcher role for OSA | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/973385 - Replace obsolete PCRE packages | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/974074 ==== Open For Review ==== - Remove rbd-iscsi-client from release management | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/972316 - Move FIPS Compliance goal back to proposed | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/969145 - Update mission statement for kolla project | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/974421 - Remove barbican-ui from release management | https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/972315 === Upcoming Events === - 2026-01-27: OpenInfra Board Meeting: https://board.openinfra.org/ - 2026-01-31: FOSDEM 2026: https://www.meetup.com/brussels-openinfra-meetup-group/events/312867974 - 2026-02-26: 2026.1 "Gazpacho" Feature Freeze / Milestone 3 === How to Contact the TC === You can reach the TC in several ways: 1. Email: send an email with the tag [tc] on this mailing list. 2. Ping us using the 'tc-members' keyword on the #openstack-tc IRC channel on OFTC. 3. Join us at our weekly meeting: The Technical Committee meets every Tuesday at 1700 UTC, except the third Tuesday of the month, when we meet at 0800 UTC [5]. Thank you very much for reading! On behalf of the OpenStack TC, Goutham Pacha Ravi (gouthamr) OpenStack TC Chair [1] 2026.1 "Gazpacho" Release Schedule: https://releases.openstack.org/gazpacho/schedule.html [2] 2026.2 OpenStack Elections: https://governance.openstack.org/election/ [3] How to submit a candidacy: https://governance.openstack.org/election/#how-to-submit-a-candidacy [4] TC Meeting IRC Log, Jan 20 2026: https://meetings.opendev.org/meetings/tc/2026/tc.2026-01-20-08.00.html [5] TC Meeting Agenda, Jan 27 2026: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/TechnicalCommittee#Next_Meeting