Open Stack

This thread is awesome :)  I love the conversation we've kicked off,
and it's touching on all the considerations we had in mind when we put
this together to begin with.

Regarding vision: I agree with a lot of what Monty, Kevin (and others)
have said.  For me, what I want to see is the pace to go for people
who have an OpenStack cloud to play with (or are thinking about
deploying their own OpenStack cloud).  I would like to see this be the
biggest/best showcase of what you can do with OpenStack.  The biggest
audience we will see are people who aren't quite ready to build their
own glance image (even though DIB makes that ridiculously easy).
People who kinda-sorta get heat or murano, but want some examples to
play with.  I think it should also encompass other assets, and if we
shift to a more open tagging/categorizing model rather than "choose
one of three buckets" we can pretty easily support that.

The biggest thing missing from what is in the catalog right now are
details around what's required to use the assets, or how you can use
them.  It's a tricky balance though, if we totally overload every
description with a wall of text (and requirements that might seem
obscure to the uninitiated) we're going to drive away the biggest
group of potential consumers.  I look forward to discussing how to
find that balance though, as I have some ideas but they're by no means
perfect.

One last thing I wanted to touch on was refstack involvement...  I
think it would be great to have something like a refstack tag that can
be included.  I think it would be a mistake to require that for
something to be added to the catalog.  As Keith said, that would lead
us to only supporting the lowest common denominator, which goes
against at least my own vision here - we should include all the
things, and just focus on making those things easy to find/consume/use
for people using OpenStack.  I do believe having this central resource
available will drive more providers to adopt standards shared by
others (portability), as it should make it more obvious when their
particular cloud only supports a small subset of assets.

Going back to what Monty said, we shouldn't have to worry about the
vendor side.  Complaining won't fix it, but shining a light on the
parts that don't match up will at least bring more visibility and spur
more conversations (hopefully!)

-Christopher