Open Stack

> James Bottomley <mailto:James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com>
> May 5, 2015 at 9:53 AM
> On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 10:45 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> Joe Gordon wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic developer
>>> oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with this, hopefully
>>> the foundation can help us find someone to write newsletter.
>> I've been discussing the idea of a "LWN" for OpenStack for some time,
>> originally with Mark McLoughlin. For those who don't know it, LWN
>> (lwn.net) is a source of quality tech reporting on Linux in general (and
>> the kernel in particular). It's written by developers and tech reporters
>> and funded by subscribers.
>>
>> An LWN-like OpenStack development newsletter would provide general
>> status, dive into specific features, report on specific
>> talks/conferences, summarize threads etc. It would be tremendously
>> useful to the development community.
>>
>> The issue is, who can write such content ? It is a full-time job to
>> produce authored content, you can't just copy (or link to) content
>> produced elsewhere. It takes a very special kind of individual to write
>> such content: the person has to be highly technical, able to tackle any
>> topic, and totally connected with the OpenStack development community.
>> That person has to be cross-project and ideally have already-built
>> legitimacy.
>
> Here, you're being overly restrictive.  Lwn.net isn't staffed by top
> level kernel maintainers (although it does solicit the occasional
> article from them).  It's staffed by people who gained credibility via
> their insightful reporting rather than by their contributions.  I see no
> reason why the same model wouldn't work for OpenStack.
>
> There is one technical difference: in the kernel, you can get all the
> information from the linux-kernel (and other mailing list) firehose if
> you're skilled enough to extract it.  With OpenStack, openstack-dev
> isn't enough so you have to do other stuff as well, but that's more or
> less equivalent to additional research.
>
>>   It's basically the kind of profile every OpenStack company
>> is struggling and fighting to hire. And that rare person should not
>> really want to spend that much time developing (or become CTO of a
>> startup) but prefer to write technical articles about what happens in
>> OpenStack development. I'm not sure such a person exists. And a
>> newsletter actually takes more than one such person, because it's a lot
>> of work (even if not weekly).
>
> That's a bit pessimistic: followed to it's logical conclusion it would
> say that lwn.net can't exist either ... which is a bit of a
> contradiction.
>
>> So as much as I'd like this to happen, I'm not convinced it's worth
>> getting excited unless we have clear indication that we would have
>> people willing and able to pull it off. The matter of who pays the bill
>> is secondary -- I just don't think the profile exists.
>>
>> For the matter, I tried to push such an idea in the past and couldn't
>> find anyone to fit the rare profile I think is needed to succeed. All
>> the people I could think of had other more interesting things to do. I
>> don't think things changed -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> Um, I assume you've thought of this already, but have you tried asking
> lwn.net?  As you say above, they already fit the profile.  Whether they
> have the bandwidth is another matter, but I believe their Chief Editor
> (Jon Corbet) may welcome a broadening of the funding base, particularly
> if the OpenStack foundation were offering seed funding for the
> endeavour.

+1 to that, although lwn.net is partially subscriber only (yes I'm a 
subscriber); so if say we had a 'openstack section' there (just like 
there is a kernel section, or a security section, or a distributions 
section...) how would that work? It'd be neat to have what we do on 
lwn.net vs having a openstack clone/similar thing to lwn.net (because 
IMHO we already make ourselves 'special' enough...).

-Josh

> James
>
>
>
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> Thierry Carrez <mailto:thierry at openstack.org>
> May 5, 2015 at 1:45 AM
>
> I've been discussing the idea of a "LWN" for OpenStack for some time,
> originally with Mark McLoughlin. For those who don't know it, LWN
> (lwn.net) is a source of quality tech reporting on Linux in general (and
> the kernel in particular). It's written by developers and tech reporters
> and funded by subscribers.
>
> An LWN-like OpenStack development newsletter would provide general
> status, dive into specific features, report on specific
> talks/conferences, summarize threads etc. It would be tremendously
> useful to the development community.
>
> The issue is, who can write such content ? It is a full-time job to
> produce authored content, you can't just copy (or link to) content
> produced elsewhere. It takes a very special kind of individual to write
> such content: the person has to be highly technical, able to tackle any
> topic, and totally connected with the OpenStack development community.
> That person has to be cross-project and ideally have already-built
> legitimacy. It's basically the kind of profile every OpenStack company
> is struggling and fighting to hire. And that rare person should not
> really want to spend that much time developing (or become CTO of a
> startup) but prefer to write technical articles about what happens in
> OpenStack development. I'm not sure such a person exists. And a
> newsletter actually takes more than one such person, because it's a lot
> of work (even if not weekly).
>
> So as much as I'd like this to happen, I'm not convinced it's worth
> getting excited unless we have clear indication that we would have
> people willing and able to pull it off. The matter of who pays the bill
> is secondary -- I just don't think the profile exists.
>
> For the matter, I tried to push such an idea in the past and couldn't
> find anyone to fit the rare profile I think is needed to succeed. All
> the people I could think of had other more interesting things to do. I
> don't think things changed -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> Joe Gordon <mailto:joe.gordon0 at gmail.com>
> May 4, 2015 at 12:03 PM
> Before going any further, I am proposing something to make it easier 
> for the developer community to keep track of what other projects are 
> working on. I am not proposing anything to directly help operators or 
> users, that is a separate problem space.
>
>
>
> In Mark McClain's TC candidacy email he brought up the issue of cross 
> project communication[0]:
>
> Better cross project communication will make it easier to share 
> technical solutions and promote a more unified experience across 
> projects.  It seems like just about every time I talk to people from 
> different projects I learn about something interesting and relevant 
> that they are working on.
>
> While I usually track discussions on the mailing list, it is a poor 
> way of keeping track of what the big issues each project is working 
> on. Stefano's 'OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter' does a good job 
> of highlighting many things including important mailing list 
> conversations, but it doesn't really answer the question of What is X 
> (Ironic, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, Heat etc.) up to?
>
> To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic 
> developer oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with 
> this, hopefully the foundation can help us find someone to write 
> newsletter.
>
> Now on to the details.
>
> I am not sure what the right cadence for this newsletter would be, but 
> I think weekly is too
> frequent and once a 6 month cycle would be too infrequent.
>
> The  big questions I would like to see answered are:
>
> * What are the big challenges each project is currently working on?
> * What can we learn from each other?
> * Where are individual projects trying to solve the same problem 
> independently?
>
> To answer these questions one needs to look at a lot of sources, 
> including:
>
> * Weekly meeting logs, or hopefully just the notes assuming we get 
> better at taking detailed notes
> * approved specs
> * periodically talk to the PTL of each project to see if any big 
> discussions were discussed else where
> * Topics selected for discussion at summits
>
> Off the top of my head here are a few topics that would make good 
> candidates for this newsletter:
>
> * What are different projects doing with microversioned APIs, I know 
> that at least two projects are tackling this
> * How has the specs process evolved in each project, we all started 
> out from a common point but seem to have all gone in slightly 
> different directions
> * What will each projects priorities be in Liberty? Do any of them 
> overlap?
> * Any process changes that projects have tried that worked or didn't work
> * How is functional testing evolving in each project
>
>
> Would this help with cross project communication? Is this feasible? 
> Other thoughts?
>
> best,
> Joe
>
>
>
>
> [0] 
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062361.html
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