Open Stack

I am running for a second term as PTL for the OpenStack Common Libraries
(Oslo) project.

I have been programming in Python professionally for over 15 years, in a
variety of application areas. I am currently a Senior Developer at
DreamHost, on our DreamCompute OpenStack-based public cloud project.

I started working on OpenStack just before the Folsom summit. I am a core
reviewer and one of the founding members of the Ceilometer project, and a
core reviewer for the requirements and unified command line interface
projects. I am also on the stable release maintenance team and am part of
the team working on the Python 3 transition. I have contributed to many of
the OpenStack projects through code and reviews.

I joined the Oslo team at the Folsom summit, and served as PTL during the
Icehouse release cycle.

Although overall I think Icehouse went well for Oslo when checked against
our internal goals, we have heard from developers in other projects who are
frustrated. Syncing fixes has become increasingly difficult, and some
breaking changes were merged in the existing libraries and not caught until
those libraries were released. The sync issue is a symptom of two
underlying problems. Our rapid growth as a community has made it difficult
to keep up with the number of new projects pulling changes from the
incubator, making it harder for us to keep everyone up to date. Oslo's goal
of providing a "collaboration space" has also been lost somewhat, and
instead the program has started to be treated more as a team producing
tools to be consumed by other projects. We have been working hard to adapt
Oslo to the changing needs of the community, but to truly fix these issues
we need to bring back the original collaborative intent of the program.

During Icehouse we have worked with the infra team to develop the processes
to release more of the incubated code as standalone libraries [1], and to
set up the additional testing that will be needed to prevent the issues we
had with libraries during Icehouse. I anticipate having a few final changes
land soon after the Icehouse feature freeze lifts to clear the way for our
Juno plans [2]. As we move more stable code out of the incubator and into
libraries, it will mean fewer sync merges and better testing of Oslo code
in devstack and unit test gate jobs. After these initial low level
libraries are released, we will be able to release more incubated modules
in future cycles.

To return Oslo to being a collaborative project, I plan to adopt and
formalize Joe Gordon's suggestion of having designated liaisons to
coordinate changes from Oslo code with each project [3]. There are just too
many other projects for the small Oslo team to be intimately familiar with,
and contribute to, all of them directly. The liaisons will be responsible
for helping merge changes into their project to move to the libraries being
released. We will also need the liaisons to help us identify API
incompatibilities between what is in the proposed library and the way
projects are using the incubated modules now.

In the days leading up to RC1, we have had several different items brought
to our attention as critical blocking issues that had been going on for
many weeks. None of these took what I would call a lot of time or effort to
fix or work around, but because we were not aware of the issues or their
impact, frustration built up in the teams affected by the issues. I hope
that having designated liaisons will help us establish communication
channels to identify, prioritize, and resolve these sorts of issues earlier.

My commit history:
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:doug.hellmann%2540dreamhost.com,n,z

My review history:
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:doug.hellmann%2540dreamhost.com,n,z

I'm looking forward to continuing to work with everyone,
Doug


[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo/CreatingANewLibrary
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo/JunoGraduationPlans
[3] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo/ProjectLiaisons
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