Open Stack

Hi friends,

I'd like to throw in my hats (yes, all of them, I'll get to that shortly) for
the Ironic PTL election. In case you don't immediately recognize me,
I'm 'jroll' on IRC, where you can always find me.

I've been working on the Ironic project for a year and a half now, as one of
an architect of the first public cloud deployment of Ironic. It's
amazing to see how far we've come. When I joined the project, it could boot a
server. Now we have a laundry list of hardware drivers, support for cleaning
a node after teardown, ironic-python-agent, Bifrost, UEFI support, and so on
and so on, with plenty more on the way.

Over the last cycle or so, I've helped lead the charge on moving the project
even faster. It took much debate, but we now have fine-grained API versioning
that helps us advance our API faster and signal changes to users. We're also
beginning to embark on our new release model, which I have great hopes for:
we shipped 23 bug fixes in the 16 days between 4.0 and 4.1. I'd like to
continue serving our users by releasing frequently.

Back to the hats: I've worn many while working on Ironic, so I think I have
a unique perspective on the different aspects of the project.

With my deployer/operator hat on:

* Let's make deployments easier. Deploying Ironic with the rest of OpenStack
  is complex, and we need to improve the docs and tools around that. We should
  also point people at Bifrost more often, where they just need the Cobbler use
  case of spinning up a bunch of metal.

* Let's make operator's lives better. Ironic has cases where things can get
  into bad states. Let's document those (or better yet, fix them!). We should
  also make it easier for operators to get an insight into their environment.
  Some of our logs are vague or hard to find; we need to improve that. We
  should also work on the metrics spec to give ops insight into Ironic's
  performance.

With my developer hat on:

* Let's build a good devref, similar to Nova's. It's difficult for new or
  casual contributors to find their way around the project, because we don't
  have docs on how we develop code and the conventions around doing so. For
  example, when does a patch need to bump the API version? Cores know this;
  is it documented?

* I'd also love to see us grow our core reviewer team. We mostly do a good
  job at keeping reviews timely. However, our reviewers are also fantastic
  developers, and it would be great if they had more time to write code. I
  think we should evaluate giving more people +2 power, and trusting them
  not to land code if they aren't familiar with that part of the system.

With my leader hat on:

* Let's collaborate better with Nova. In the past, we haven't done a good
  job of this, and there was even some animosity between the projects. We now
  have two Nova liasions that help out by bring patches to nova-core's
  attention. It's a good start, but I think we need people working on Ironic
  that follow development in Nova that could impact us; truly collaborating
  to make sure Nova doesn't break us, and vice-versa. These folks should be
  actively reviewing Nova specs and code to ensure it doesn't break our model,
  and working to bring our model back in line with what Nova expects.

* Let's also start paying better attention to cross-project initiatives in
  OpenStack; collaborating with the API working group, cross-project specs,
  etc. I've started doing this, but the community needs more people doing it.
  We should be reviewing specs from these teams and making sure we implement
  those initiatives in a timely fashion. Most recent example: Keystone v3.
  We're way behind on getting that work done.

There's other things I'd like to accomplish as well, but those are the main
pieces. As for my downstream hat, it won't be getting as much use if I'm
elected. You can look at my history as one of the most active Ironic
developers on IRC, helping people solve problems, reviewing code, and helping
design large features. I've confirmed with my employer that if I'm elected
PTL, nearly 100% of my focus will be upstream, and you'll be seeing more of
me, for better or worse. :)

Regardless of the outcome, I'm looking forward to serving the Ironic community
during Mitaka.

Thanks for reading,

// jim