Open Stack

Greetings,

I would like to run for the Nova PTL position.


*** Qualifications ***

I am a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.

I have been contributing to OpenStack since the end of 2011.  My
contributions have primarily been focused on Nova and Oslo.  I am a
member of the nova-core, oslo-core, and vulnerability management teams.
I am also an elected member of the Technical Committee.

I have had the most commits to Nova over the last 12 months:

    https://www.ohloh.net/p/novacc/contributors?query=&sort=commits_12_mo

In the last 6 months, there have been 13395 Nova reviews.  I did 1073 of
them, which is the 5th most of all participating reviewers.  The most by
any reviewer was 1281, by Vish.  [1]

I have also started to contribute more heavily to areas that are of
critical interest to a PTL.  For the last few months I have run many of
the weekly Nova meetings as well as assisted with the review and
maintenance of project blueprints.

If you would like more detail on my professional or open source
background, you can find that information on:

    http://www.linkedin.com/in/russellbryant
    https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/russellb


*** Platform ***

1) I am dedicated to the success of Nova, as well as not having to work
unhealthy hours to make it happen.  It is impractical for the Nova PTL
to track detailed status on every active bug, blueprint, and review.  I
would like to work on expanding the role of sub-teams.

When this topic has come up in the past, I feel like it has been
derailed on technical details, such as how topic branches might work.
Meanwhile, I think sub-teams have been forming and operating naturally
without additional technical existence.

If you look at the list of OpenStack meetings [2], you will see meetings
for the DB team, XenAPI, and Hyper-V.  I think these are good examples.
I would like to encourage the continued growth of sub-teams that work
together on a common interest area in Nova.  This includes collaborating
on getting the work done, ensuring that work targeted against releases
is on track, and reporting team status to the rest of the Nova
development community.

2) Nova integrates with every integrated OpenStack project in some way.
Collaboration with other projects is very important.  One area that I
think could use some additional attention is the collaboration between
Nova and Quantum.  I would like to step up the effort to get to where we
are no longer maintaining two networking stacks.

As an actionable step in this area, I think it would be worthwhile to
hold a joint Nova and Quantum design summit track (half a day?), where
we focus on the next steps we can take toward making Quantum the default
(and eventually the only) network provider for Nova.

3) Given the size of the Nova project, I think the role of the Nova PTL
is largely a management role.  However, I still certainly have my own
technical interests and list of projects that I feel are important.

Security is of critical importance to me.  A compromise of a Nova
deployment could be a disaster.  During Folsom and Grizzly, I helped
with a lot of the work toward being able to further isolate compute
nodes from the rest of the system (no-db-compute and all related work).
no-db-compute is complete (though there may be additional performance
work).  The next step is add additional security to messaging.  We need
message signing (trusted-messaging).  It has been talked about in the
last couple of design summits.  It's time to make it happen.  Signing
messages is just a prerequisite and a small amount of work compared to
taking advantage of it in Nova.  I still think significant progress can
be made in this area in Havana.

The other area that I am particularly interested in is Nova's
scalability.  In particular, I'm very interested in ongoing work on Nova
Cells.  Chris Behrens has done an excellent job developing Cells and
getting it merged into Nova for the Grizzly release, though it will be
considered experimental.  I would like to encourage others to join in on
Cells development so that we can fully recommend cells for all large
scale deployments.


*** Logistics and Final Comments ***

If I were to be elected as the Nova PTL, I would look to give up my
position on the Vulnerability Management Team as soon as possible.  The
size of the VMT is kept intentionally small (3 members) and the team's
role is critical.  We would need someone to take my place that can give
the VMT the time it deserves while I focused on the responsibilities of
the Nova PTL.

I'm planning to be on vacation for about a week and a half shortly
before the Havana summit.  This would likely have some impact on design
summit proposal reviews and scheduling.  I'm confident that with the
help of other members of the nova-core team, this would not be a problem
and that the design summit would still be a success.

Finally, I would like to thank Vishvananda Ishaya for all of his hard
work as the founding PTL of Nova.  Vish's leadership and sacrifice has
been instrumental in making the project the success that it is today.


Thank you for your consideration!


[1] https://gist.github.com/russellb/5082605
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings

-- 
Russell Bryant