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Hey everyone,

Wow, how six months flies! I'd like to announce my candidacy to continue on as
Cinder PTL for the Newton release cycle.

A lot has been accomplished in the Mitaka cycle. After a lot of work by many
folks, over a couple development cycles, we now have what we consider a "tech
preview" of rolling upgrades. It just hasn't had enough runtime and testing for
us to say it's "official". We will likely need to fix a few minor things in the
Newton timeframe before it's fully baked and reliable. But it has come a long
way and I'm really happy with the progress that has been made.

Another priority we had identified for Mitaka was active/active high
availability of the c-vol service. We were not able to complete that work, but
many pieces have been put in place to support that in Newton. We fixed several
API races and added the ability to use something like tooz for locking. These
are foundation pieces for us to be able to start breaking out things and
running in a reliable active/active configuration.

Microversion support has been added and there is now a new v3 API endpoint.
This was a bit of a controversy as we really had just started to get folks to
move off of v1 to v2. To be safe though I decided it would protect end users
better to have a clearly separate new API endpoint for the microversion
compatibility. And now hopefully it is our last.

Replication was another slightly controversial feature implemented. Late in
Liberty we finally agreed on a spec for a v2 version of replication. The v2
spec was approved so late that no one actually had time to implement it for
that release. As we started to implement it for Mitaka we found that a lot of
compromises had crept in during the spec review that it had the risk of being
too complex and having some of the issues we were trying to get rid of by
moving away from replication v1. At our midcycle we had a lot of discussion on
replication and finally decided to change course before it was too late.
Whether that ends up being the best choice when we look back a year from now or
not, I'm proud of the team that we were willing to put on the brakes and make
changes - even though it was more work for us - before we released something
out to end users that would have caused problems or a poor experience.

Other than that, there's mostly been a lot of good bug fixes. Eight new drivers
have been added from (I think) five different vendors. The os-brick library is
now 1.0 (actually 1.1.0) and is in use by both Cinder and Nova for common
storage management operations so there is not a duplication and disconnect of
code between the two projects. We were also able to add a Brick cinder client
extension to be able to perform storage management on nodes without Nova (bare
metal, etc.).

None of this goodness was from me.

We have a bunch of smart and active members of the Cinder community. They are
the ones that are making a difference, working across the community, and
making sure Cinder is a solid component in an OpenStack cloud.

Being part of the Cinder community has been one of the best and most engaging
parts of my career. I am lucky enough to have support from my company to be
able to devote time to being a part of this. I would love the opportunity to
continue as PTL to not just contribute where I can, but to make sure the folks
doing the heavy lifting have the support and project organization they need to
avoid distractions and be able to focus on getting the important stuff done.

I think in Newton we need to continue the momentum and get Active/Active Cinder
volume service support implemented. We need to continue to work closely with
the Nova team to make sure our interaction is correct and solid. But also work
to make Cinder a useful storage management interface in environments without
Nova. I will continue to encourage developer involvement and vendor support.
We need to improve the user experience with better error reporting when things
go wrong. And last, but definitely not least, we need to continue to expand our
testing - unit, functional, and tempest - to make sure we can avoid those
errors and deliver a high quality and solid solution.

I really feel I'm just getting into the swing of things. I would love the
opportunity to serve as PTL for the Newton release.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sean McGinnis (smcginnis)