Hi,

The OpenDev community needs volunteers to help with the maintenance of
the following images, otherwise we may need to remove them from Zuul:

* CentOS Stream (x86 and Arm)
* Rocky Linux (x86 and Arm)
* Ubuntu (Arm only)
* Debian (Arm only)

The preceding images are all active and in use; the following images do
not currently build and without further action are already slated to be
removed:

* openEuler
* Gentoo

The Zuul project is nearing the end of an effort to update the way that
it launches nodes when running tests.  This promises to bring a number
of benefits to OpenDev users, including better responsiveness,
availability, scaling, and more end-user control over the configuration.

In short, we are removing Nodepool as a standalone project and
incorporating all of its functionality into Zuul itself.

OpenDev currently builds the base images we use for test nodes using
nodepool-builder, which is a standalone daemon running on a small number
of dedicated hosts which runs diskimage-builder and uploads the results
to the clouds we use.  This approach ensures a consistent image across
the many clouds that we employ, plus effective caching of content used
in jobs.

The configuration for these image builds is, as is standard for every
part of OpenDev, public and changes to it are able to be proposed by any
member of our community.  Yet there is limited testing of those changes,
and new image builds can only happen after configuration changes are
merged and deployed.

With the new system, image builds will happen in Zuul jobs, which makes
it far easier to observe the builds and examine the results.

Most importantly, any changes to the image configuration are entirely
self-testing.

Which leads us to the request for volunteers.  We have already copied
over and adapted the x86 Debian and Ubuntu images to the new system.
But we need someone with knowledge of Arm, CentOS, and Rocky images to
port the old configuration to the new system.  It's not a lot of work,
but from time to time these images do need updates (for new OS releases,
for example), so it's important that we have a community of users who
are able to assist in that maintenance.

If no volunteers are willing to help maintain this community resource,
we may need to remove support for these images.  Starting around May 15,
we would consider these images best-effort: we may not run them in all
providers as we move more of our workload to zuul-launcher.  Jobs that
use them may start to fail with NODE_ERROR.  Later, once we finish the
move to zuul-launcher (tentatively July 1), any request for nodes
without images would return NODE_ERROR.

Along with myself, others in the OpenDev community are willing to assist
anyone who is interested in working on this.  It is an excellent
opportunity to get involved in helping to support the community: it
requires no previous knowledge of OpenDev systems or any special access.

If you are willing to port the nodepool-builder configuration for these
images to the new Zuul system, please let us know (by either responding
to this thread on service-discuss, or contacting us in OFTC in
#opendev).  Here are some relevant links to get you started:

The current nodepool-builder configuration:


https://opendev.org/openstack/project-config/src/branch/master/nodepool/nodepool.yaml

The new zuul-launcher configuration:


https://opendev.org/opendev/zuul-providers/src/branch/master/zuul.d/image-build-jobs.yaml

Thanks in advance,

-Jim (on behalf of the OpenDev project)