Open Stack

Flavio, Glance and OpenStack benefited during your reign or period of humble service.
Will miss you at the helm. Also thank you for anointing/attracting two new solid cores: Brian and Sabari
Malini


-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Fifield [mailto:tom at openstack.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2016 7:55 PM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [glance] Glance Mitaka: Passing the torch

A beautiful post, sir. Thank you for everything!

On 09/03/16 22:15, Flavio Percoco wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I'm not going to run for Glance's PTL position for the Newton timeframe.
>
> There are many motivations behind this choice. Some of them I'm 
> willing to discuss in private if people are interested but I'll go as 
> far as saying there are personal and professional reasons for me to 
> not run again.
>
> As I've always done in my past cycles as PTL, I'd like to take some 
> time to summarize what's happened in the past cycle not only for the 
> new PTL to know what's coming up but for the community to know how 
> things went.
>
> Before I even start, I'd like to thank everyone in the Glance community.
> I truly
> believe this was a great cycle for the project and the community has 
> gotten stronger. None of this would have been possible without the 
> help of all of you and for that, I'm deeply in debt with you all. It 
> does not just take an employer to get someone to contribute to a 
> project. Being paid, for those who are, to do Open Source is not 
> enough. It takes passion, motivation and a lot of patience to analyze 
> a technology, think out of the box and look for ways it can be 
> improved either by fixing bugs or by implementing new features. The 
> amount of time and dedication this process requires is probably worth 
> way more than what we get back from it.
>
> Now, with all that being said, here's Glance Mitaka for all of you:
>
> Completed Features
> ==================
>
> I think I've mentioned this already but I'm proud of it so I'll say it 
> again.
> The prioritization and scheduling of Glance Mitaka went so well that 
> we managed to release M-3 without any feature freeze exception (FFE) 
> request. This doesn't mean all the features were implemented. In fact, 
> at least 4 were pushed back to Newton. However, the team communicated, 
> reviewed, sprinted and coded in such a way that we were able to 
> re-organize the schedule to avoid wasting time on things we new 
> weren't going to make it. This required transparency and hard 
> decisions but that's part of the job, right?
>
> * [0] CIM Namespace Metadata
> * [1] Support download from and upload to Cinder volumes
> * [2] Glance db purge utility
> * [3] Deprecate Glance v3 API
> * [4] Implement trusts for Glance
> * [5] Migrate the HTTP Store to Use Requests
> * [6] Glance Image Signing and Verification
> * [7] Supporting OVF Single Disk Image Upload
> * [8] Prevention of Unauthorized errors during upload/download in 
> Swift driver
> * [9] Add filters using an ‘in’ operator
>
> [0]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/cim-namespace-metadata-definitions.html
>
> [1]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/cinder-store-upload-download.html
>
> [2]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/database-purge.html
>
> [3]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/deprecate-v3-api.html
>
> [4]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/glance-trusts.html
>
> [5]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/http-store-on-requests.html
>
> [6]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/image-signing-and-verification-support.html
>
> [7]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/ovf-lite.html
>
> [8]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/prevention-of-401-in-swift-driver.html
>
> [9]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/specs/mitaka/impleme
> nted/v2-add-filters-with-in-operator.html
>
>
> If the above doesn't sound impressive to you, let me fill you in with 
> some extra info about Glance's community.
>
> Community
> =========
>
> Glance's community currently has 12 core members, 3 of which joined 
> during Mitaka and 2 of those 3 members joined at the end of the cycle. 
> That means the team ran on 9 reviewers for most of the cycle except 
> that out of those 9, 1 left the team and joined later in the cycle and 
> 3 folks weren't super active this cycle. That left the team with 5 
> constant reviewers throughout the cycle.
>
> Now, the above is *NOT* to say that the success of the cycle is thanks 
> to those
> 5 constant reviewers. On the contrary, it's to say that we've managed 
> to build a community capable of working together with other non-core 
> reviewers.
> This was a
> key thing for this cycle.
>
> I don't think it's a secret to anyone that, at the beginning of the 
> cycle, the community was fragile and somewhat split. There were 
> different opinions on what Glance should (or shouldn't) look like, 
> what new features Glance should (or
> shouldn't) have and where the project should be headed in the next 6 
> months.
>
> The team sat down, the team talked and the team agreed on what the 
> project should be and that's what the team did in the Mitaka cycle. 
> Sharing one message with the rest of the OpenStack community (and 
> especially new Glance
> contributors) was a key for the community to become stronger.
>
> What changed? What did the community do differently?
>
> Priorities and Goals
> --------------------
>
> Mitaka was the first cycle that Glance strictly followed a list of 
> priorities [0]. Funny enough, 2 of those priorities didn't make it in 
> Mitaka but we'll get to that in a bit.
>
> The list of priorities didn't do it all by itself. The list of 
> priorities gave us a target, a goal. It helped us to remain focused. 
> It kept us on track.
> However, it did way more than that. The list of priorities allowed us for:
>
> * Sending a clear message of what the community has agreed on and where the
>   community is headed
> * Selecting a narrow list of features that we would be able to work on and
>   review throughout the cycle
> * Scheduling and splitting reviews to accommodate the priorities
>
> Of those points, I believe the second one is the one that really did 
> it for us.
> We kept the set of new features small so that we could focus on what 
> was important. We had more proposals than we approved and we rejected 
> the rest based on our priorities. This is something I'd like to see 
> happening again in Glance and I'd like to encourage the next PTL to do 
> the same and be *strict* about it.
>
> [0]
> http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/glance-specs/priorities/mitaka-pr
> iorities.html
>
>
> Reduce the review backlog
> -------------------------
>
> We abandoned patches [0]! We removed from the review queue all the 
> patches that, for 2 or more months, had been in merge conflict, had 
> had -1/-2 from cores or had had -1 from jenkins (hope I'm not missing 
> something here). We did that and we made the backlog shorter, we kept 
> in the review list what was really relevant at that moment.
>
> Something important about the above is that we didn't abandon patches 
> that had stalled for lack of reviews. We prioritized those, we bumped 
> those to the top of our review list and we provided the reviews those 
> patches deserved. Some of them landed, some didn't but the important 
> bit is that those patches were reviewed.
> Glance's current backlog (verified patches, Workflow 0 and no -2s) is 
> less than
> 90 patches across all projects (likely way less than that but I just 
> did a rough
> count) and the most important thing is that *ALL* these patches have 
> received reviews in 2016. Now, if you don't think this is great, you 
> should have seen our backlog before.
>
> Now, there's no point in cleaning up the review queue if we're going 
> to let it fill up again. Right? This is where the community 
> awesomeness comes to light. We created a review dashboard[1], which 
> some folks used to organize their reviews. I found it super useful, I 
> used it to prioritize my reviews and help other folks to prioritize 
> theirs. When you're given an organized list of reviews rather than 
> just a list of random reviews, it's *way* easier for you to know what 
> to review.
> That right there is the key. To know what to review. I believe, in 
> Mitaka, the team knew what to focus on and the team also knew someone 
> in the community was ready to provide a fresher, cleaner, list of 
> reviews they could focus on. Some folks would prefer to go and make up 
> a list themselves, others will prefer to have one ready. Either way, 
> having a clear story of where the focus should go is the key to help 
> reviews move faster. Remove the noise, it distracts from people from 
> what's really important.
>
> [0] http://stackalytics.com/?user_id=glancebot@mailinator.com
> [1] http://bit.ly/glance-dashboard
>
> Review Days
> -----------
>
> Not really a new thing. This has happened before and we just kept 
> doing it. The difference, perhaps, is that we increased the number of 
> review days in the cycle. We tried to do at least 1 review day per 
> milestone and we're now doing a Review Monday until the end of the 
> cycle to get as many bug fixes as possible in before the release. RC1 
> is looking good already!
>
> So, if you'd ask me, I believe what changed was the community. The 
> community got together, polished some things, and focused on what's 
> important *the project*.
> If you read between lines, the above shows one constant pattern, the 
> community matured and it found what its placed in the OpenStack 
> community.
>
> Single Team
> -----------
>
> The Glance team is now back to being a single reviewing machine rather 
> than several, isolated, teams with specific tasks, which sometimes 
> ended up duplicated. The Glance Driver's team has been merged into the 
> Glance Core team and the Glare team (Artifacts) is not using the Fast 
> Track anymore.
>
> Having smaller teams has resulted in a very useful thing to do for 
> other projects. Depending on the size of the project, it'd be possible 
> to map tasks to smaller teams and then reduce them once the job is 
> done ;).
> Unfortunately, given
> Glance's team size, this ended up adding *more* things to do to 
> members of those smaller teams that were also part of the other teams 
> as well.
>
> One reason to mention this is because we'll have the temptation to do 
> this again in the future but, as it's been proven thus far, Glance's 
> community is not big enough to make such splits worth it and those end 
> up causing more harm to the community than good.
>
> Spec Freeze
> -----------
>
> The team incorporated a spec freeze in this cycle. The dates that were 
> picked were not the most ideal ones but the freeze helped a lot to 
> bring back focus on code reviews and coding. This freeze put a 
> timeline on folks to get their proposals ready, hence forcing them to 
> have enough time to implement such proposals. Having open milestones 
> distracts the community from the schedule.
> Announcing such milestones in advance and providing constant reminders 
> helped with making sure folks were prepared and ready to react.
>
>
> Was it all rainbows?
> ====================
>
> No, it was not. There were and there are *many* things we need to work 
> on and improve. For instance, 2 of the priorities didn't make it this 
> cycle.
> One of
> them (Nova's adoption of Glance's v2) simply requires a bit of more 
> work and it specifically requires a better alignment with the Nova 
> community's priorities.
> In other words, Nova needs to make this a priority for them.
>
> The second priority that missed the deadline is the refactor of the 
> image import workflow. Some of you might be thinking "Guys, you had 1 
> job, *ONE* job and it was to discuss and implement that refactor". 
> Well, turns out that such refactor has an impact on *every* cloud and 
> it's not something the team can afford to change a third time (yes, 
> this is the second time the image import workflow is refactored). I'm 
> actually happy it didn't make it in Mitaka because that gave the team 
> more time to evaluate the proposal that had been discussed at the 
> summit, the issues around it and the different alternatives.
> Nonetheless, I am a
> bit sad about how things evolved with this proposal because at the 
> very beginning of the cycle we were a bit naive in our planning of this work.
> That is
> to say, that we should've probably known from the beginning that we 
> wouldn't have had the time to implement this spec and that it would 
> have taken us the whole cycle to discuss it. The problem is not that 
> we didn't know it to begin with but the fact that we weren't able to 
> communicate that to the community from the beginning. I don't think 
> this is a big deal, though. We realized soon enough that we shouldn't 
> rush this and that dedicating the cycle to discuss this spec was more 
> better than rushing it and then have a poor implementation of it.
>
> We also experimented with a new process for lite specs and it was not 
> a huge success. This impacted some of the lite specs that had been 
> proposed but we did our best to come out of that situation without 
> impacting other's people work. In fact, that situation not just 
> highlighted the issues we had with the process but the team 
> responsible for it (the glance-drivers team), which ended up being 
> merged into the glance core team (as I mentioned in the previous 
> section). This process is being refactored and you can learn a bit 
> more about it in this review[0].
>
> There's one more thing I wish we would have dedicated more time on. 
> That's tempest. Unfortunately, given the time available, size of the 
> team and the priorities we had, tempest did not receive as much love 
> as we'd have loved to.
> There are several tempest tests that need to be cleaned up a bit, 
> especially on the V2 side.
>
> [0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/282516/
>
> To the Glance Community
> =======================
>
> All the credits for the above goes to you! As a PTL I don't think I 
> can take
> *any* credit for what I consider a successful cycle brought by the 
> community itself. I instead recognize that it was all possible because 
> the community decided to go back to being awesome. I'm a believer that 
> the PTL's role is all about enabling the community to be awesome. 
> Planning, prioritization, scheduling, etc. it all serves a single 
> goal, which is to allow the community for doing what they know best 
> and focus on that.
>
> I've enjoyed every single of my stages in this community. Rushing 
> through reviews, coding like crazy, ranting like crazy, leading the 
> community and back to reviewing like crazy. These years as a member of 
> Glance's community have taught me a lot about this project and how 
> critical it is for the rest of the community. As I always say, it's 
> one of those projects that can take your whole cloud down without you 
> even noticing but I do hope you notice it.
>
> Glance is often referred to as a simple project (true), as a small 
> project (kinda true) and sometimes as not super cool (false). I'd like 
> to remind you that not only Glance is a "cool" project to work on but 
> it's also super critical for OpenStack. As I remind you this, I'd like 
> to urge you to help the project stay on track across the cycles. 
> Glance (as every other projects) depends on the ability of its 
> community to dictate what's best for it.
>
> Glance's interoperability has been compromised and there's a plan to 
> help bringing it back. Let's get that done. Glance's v1 is not 
> considered secure and it must be deprecated. Let's do that as well. 
> Glance's stability and security has shown some weaknesses. Let's not 
> ignore that. Working on new features is always sexy. Working on the 
> new cool stuff that other projects are doing might seem like a must do 
> task. I'd argue and say there's a time for everything and, while 
> Glance shares OpenStack's priorities, there are times where the 
> project needs to take a step back, put itself together again and start 
> again. I don't believe Glance has left that self-healing period and 
> I'd like to urge the whole community to keep this in mind.
>
> To the new PTL
> ==============
>
> Listen! Listen to the things the OpenStack community has to say. 
> Listen to the things external folks have to say. Most importantly, 
> listen to what the Glance community has to say. Glance is not a 
> playground for making random decisions. If you listen to what the 
> community has to say, it'll be easy enough to know what to do and what 
> the next steps are. However, you should be ready for making hard 
> decisions and you need to have the courage to do so. During the last 
> elections, I wrote a post[0] about what being a PTL means and I'd like 
> to encourage you to read it, even if you've done so already.
>
> If you look at the goals we set for Glance during Mitaka and the 
> results we achieved, you'll soon notice what the priorities for the 
> next cycle should be.
> The community will help shaping those priorities but the baseline is 
> there already.
>
> A great cycle is not measured on how many features the community is 
> able to implement. Therefore, I encourage you to not fall under the 
> temptation of approving as many specs as possible. It is *perfectly 
> fine* to say no to specs because they conflict with the project's 
> priorities. The more specs the team approves, the more code there will 
> be, the more people the project will need to complete the feature 
> (code wise and review wise). Keep the release small, keep it concise, 
> keep it focused. It's extremely important to communicate the intent of 
> the release to the rest of the community. Do not forget Glance *is* a 
> critical piece of every cloud.
>
> Glance's community is not formed by the core team. It's formed by 
> every person willing to dedicate time to the project either on reviews 
> or code. Work with them, encourage them. They *are* helping the 
> project. Some folks simply don't want to do reviews, that's fine. They 
> are still helping with code and bug fixes.
> Recognize that and make sure they feel part of the community because 
> they are.
> Expanding the core team is great as long as you can ensure folks in 
> the team are aligned with the team's priorities. Welcome new members 
> and do it gradually.
>
> One more thing, learn to delegate. During my time as a PTL, I relied 
> on other members as much as possible for keeping up with some tasks. 
> For instance, Erno Kuvaja helped immensely with releases and stable 
> maintenance, Nikhil Komawar kept the team updated about the 
> cross-project initiatives, Stuart Mclaren, Hemanth Makkapati and Brian 
> Rosmaita worked with the vulnerability team on security issues, etc. 
> Thanks to all of them for their immense help and I do hope you'll keep 
> up at what you're doing :). In other words, burnout is real and you 
> gotta take care of yourself too. Work with the community, there's no 
> need to take everything on your shoulders as you might end up dropping 
> some balls. When folks don't show up on reviews and they don't share 
> their opinions, do not give those as granted. Find them and ask for 
> it.
>
> And please, I beg you, let's get rid of v1!
>
> [0] http://blog.flaper87.com/post/something-about-being-a-ptl/
>
> Thanks for reading this long email (or to at least have bothered to 
> skip till the end of it ;) Flavio
>
> P.S: I've posted this in my blog too:
> http://blog.flaper87.com/post/glance-mitaka-passing-the-torch
> /
>
>
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