Open Stack

Hello everybody, I'm announcing my candidacy for the TC.

I loved Jay's list of reasons [not ]to vote for him - and I'd like you
to apply those to me too :).
[http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062234.html]

I think OpenStack is facing several key challenges at the moment.

We've scaled our community but progress on scaling individual projects
is slower. This is a complicated, thorny project, with many
contributing factors. Everything from the basic primitives we make
consistently available (such as exposing notifications to API clients,
or what our RPC layer can do) through social factors (who can review,
what reviews are for) and the sheer technical complexity involved in
our CI system. The IT world hasn't slowed down since OpenStack was
founded, and there is more and more need for us to move fast and
execute well on the desires of our contributors - because those
desires are driven by a need to solve real problems they [or their
users/customers] are facing.

Our product (OpenStack) is becoming balkanized. Operations that should
be easy and consistent across many clouds are not, and it is becoming
harder. Again there are many contributing factors: each service has
its own domain with gnarly backends, different things that are slow or
fast or flaky, and a different group of engineers discussing what the
API should look like, how it should behave, and what is or isn't in
scope. OpenStackClient as a consistent Python API to such things is a
good step, but the heart of the problem lies in how we're defining the
interface users use. We need to find some way to bring together the
folk building the individual services to provide a consistent
experience for users. Our APIs need to be predictable, simple and easy
to work with.

And these join together to form the third challenge: delivering on our
vision: "to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing
platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds
regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively
scalable''. Thierry put it well when he said we had been caught in the
middle tier - neither very small nor very large clouds are a good fit
for OpenStack. We're failing many potential users because of this.

Last time I was on the TC I felt I helped OpenStack, but I did not run
for re-election because I knew I had not helped as much as I could,
and I wanted to avoid trying to eek out enough time to do so. My lack
of time was due to being a PTL at the same time. I am not a PTL - and
won't run for PTL in any project if I'm on the TC; I no longer believe
there is enough time in a week to do justice to both the PTL and TC
offices. If elected I'll be able to devote the majority of my time to
the TC and related issues - making me much more effective - so I can
help shift the dial on all the challenges we face.

-Rob


-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud