Open Stack

I'd like another term as Compute PTL, if you'll have me.

We live in interesting times. OpenStack has clearly gained a large
amount of mind share in the open cloud marketplace, with Nova being a
very commonly deployed component. Yet, we don't have a fantastic
container solution, which is our biggest feature gap at this point.
Worse -- we have a code base with a huge number of bugs filed against
it, an unreliable gate because of subtle bugs in our code and
interactions with other OpenStack code, and have a continued need to
add features to stay relevant. These are hard problems to solve.

Interestingly, I think the solution to these problems calls for a
social approach, much like I argued for in my Juno PTL candidacy
email. The problems we face aren't purely technical -- we need to work
out how to pay down our technical debt without blocking all new
features. We also need to ask for understanding and patience from
those feature authors as we try and improve the foundation they are
building on.

The specifications process we used in Juno helped with these problems,
but one of the things we've learned from the experiment is that we
don't require specifications for all changes. Let's take an approach
where trivial changes (no API changes, only one review to implement)
don't require a specification. There will of course sometimes be
variations on that rule if we discover something, but it means that
many micro-features will be unblocked.

In terms of technical debt, I don't personally believe that pulling
all hypervisor drivers out of Nova fixes the problems we face, it just
moves the technical debt to a different repository. However, we
clearly need to discuss the way forward at the summit, and come up
with some sort of plan. If we do something like this, then I am not
sure that the hypervisor driver interface is the right place to do
that work -- I'd rather see something closer to the hypervisor itself
so that the Nova business logic stays with Nova.

Kilo is also the release where we need to get the v2.1 API work done
now that we finally have a shared vision for how to progress. It took
us a long time to get to a good shared vision there, so we need to
ensure that we see that work through to the end.

We live in interesting times, but they're also exciting as well.

Michael

-- 
Rackspace Australia