Open Stack

Greetings,

I'm writing to submit my candidacy for election to the OpenStack
Technical Committee.

By way of introduction, my name is Amrith Kumar, I am the Chief
Technology Officer[1] at Tesora[2], a company focused on
Database-as-a-Service and the OpenStack Trove project.

As OpenStack evolves, so too should the Technical Committee. I believe
that the Technical Committee has a very high representation from the
core (nova, cinder, swift, glance, neutron, ...) projects, and there
needs to be more representation of the other projects in OpenStack
that are not part of this core (trove, sahara, ...). I believe that
the future success of OpenStack depends heavily on the successful
integration of these non-core projects, and the ease with which people
can deploy the core and non-core components of OpenStack.

If elected, I would bring a different perspective to the TC, one that
would broaden the representation the non-core projects on the
Technical Committee.

Here is a quick summary of what I do relative to OpenStack, and why I
believe that you should consider my candidacy for TC

   - active contributor and member of the core review team for Trove,
     and spend all of my time on upstream development activities
     related to OpenStack Trove. I am also a periodic contributor to
     Oslo and the Trove liaison to Oslo

   - authored the book on OpenStack Trove[3] along with Doug Shelley,
     a co-worker and contributor to the Trove project

   - OpenStack evangelism and outreach activities include

          - Frequent participant and speaker at a variety of technical
            events where I have spoken about OpenStack in general, and
            sometimes Trove in particular

          - Frequent participant in the Boston OpenStack Meetup,
            presenter at a number of OpenStack Meetups all over the
            country

          - Actively promoting an initiative called "OpenStack in the
            Classroom" [4] that I shared on the mailing list several
            months ago. I have had good luck promoting it to a number
            of colleges in the Boston area

    - chosen by the OpenStack Foundation to serve as part of a global
      committee of OpenStack experts developing a list of Domains and
      Tasks essential for OpenStack administration professionals.

I believe firmly that the long term success of OpenStack depends on
the ease with which users are able to deploy and bring a cloud into
production. The big tent proposal was a very important step in that
direction but much remains to be done.

It is essential that we make it easier for users to deploy and use
other projects that are not part of the "core", projects like Trove,
Sahara, Magnum, and so on.

A current example of the kind(s) of issues that I believe to exist
relates to the creation of protected 'service resources' that make it
possible for services to provision servers and storage in tenant
context while making it impossible for tenants to manipulate these
resources other than through the service that provisioned them
[5],[6].

This is an example of a specific initiative that I have been working
with members of the community to address.

This is a feature that will have to be provided by the core projects
and the beneficiaries are the non-core projects that request these
'service resources'.

I believe that it is imperative that the Technical Committee take a
leadership role in addressing these kinds of issues, as it did in the
big-tent approach.

The activities of the TC align closely with my own skills and past
experience which include architecting and implementing complex
computer architecture, with flexible and extensible API's and then
working with diverse teams to deliver the software that implements
these. I work very effectively as a facilitator of teams and in
helping groups of people work together.

I believe that I will be able to work with the rest of the team and
drive this kind of activity to successful completion. I am committed
to the success of OpenStack and would like to contribute further as a
member of the Technical Committee.

I look forward to your support in the upcoming election, and I thank
the outgoing members of the TC for their hard work and the solid
foundation that they have laid for future committees.

Here are some more links:

     Official Candidacy: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/229073/
     Review history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/reviewer:9664,n,z
     Commit history: https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:9664,n,z
     Stackalytics: http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=amrith&release=all
     Foundation: http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/15733
     Freenode: amrith
     LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amrith

Thank you,

-amrith

[1] http://www.tesora.com/people/amrith-kumar/
[2] http://www.tesora.com/
[3] http://www.apress.com/9781484212226
[4] http://openstack.markmail.org/thread/ukckrielspbrjejp
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/186357/
[6] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/203880/