Open Stack

Hello everyone,

I would like to announce my candidacy for the role of PTL of Glance for
Newton.

1. Personal Commitment
My employer will be giving me 100% time to focus on this role and I do
not intend to take other roles within the community for the sake of
focusing on the development and progress of our project. I am as much of
a community developer as I like being a software one and of late, I've
been focusing hard on the first more. Thanks to this community I was
given the challenging yet interesting task of leading Glance through a
difficult phase of an identity crisis during Kilo timeframe. We've come
quite far, addressed many concerns and are making good progress therein.
However, there's a lot ahead of us like the recent image locations usage
confusion, where tasks are heading and what do image sharing plans look
like. This keeps me driven and interested in the development of Glance.

2. Themed Focus
For newton, we already have over a dozen solid proposals for summit
sessions [1] and I expect a few more. While we welcome all the feedback
that we can possibly get in such face to face conversations, it will be
essential deriving priorities out of them. Without a doubt, we've import
refactor work, Nova's support of v2 API as top priorities. Those will be
the encompassing development goals for Newton. However, any software
project has some general changes that sometimes become critical if not
fixed in a limited time frame and we've seen that happen multiple times
over the history of the project. I would like to divide those into the
following focus areas: security, stability, feature additions,
performance, maintenance, testing, usability, and cross-project. Not all
the dimensions of the project will have proposal talks, we will still
encounter refactors and bugs for each. Sometimes those bugs are heavy to
handle with multiple hundred lines of code per review. Historically
Glance core being a overall low bandwidth team, we are likely to get
bottlenecked in one of these areas. I would like to work with the team
during the summit to help prioritize an item for each dimension so that
everyone is aware and thinking of what's coming their way for reviews.
This will be a discussion that involves themed focus to help establish a
good review cadence.

3. Enablement
Always! I've always been a fan of enabling folks to do their job,
discover their interest in the project and help move OpenStack as a
whole in a positive direction. I think processes help but sometimes they
become too hard to deal with. I believe the most productive environments
are the ones where people who are driven & active get opportunities to
take important decisions in their focus areas while being hit with
appropriate trade-offs from partners and the vantage point is provided
by the PTL.

4. Collaboration
Glance being a service consumed by many OpenStack services, we are a
team that needs to be actively engaged in cross-project meetings,
initiatives, and ad-hoc syncs. Import refactor work, deprecation of v1
API and building of compatibility layer for Glance requires a ton of
cross-project involvement with DefCore committee, Nova team, etc. Also,
the momentum Glare is getting with its consumers will need quite active
participation in the respective syncs. I have recently taken a co-lead
role for the cross project effort on quotas mainly with the objective of
shaping the right quotas semantics for Glance but also to help the
bigger OpenStack community in the process. I will give up this co-lead
role and help the members with a smooth transition and keep myself
involved from purely Glance perspective to ensure my full attention to
the project. However, I hope to achieve more collaboration with the help
of other team members in all the different areas.

5. Finding equity to the unbalance
I believe we've had a good number of drives in OpenStack, developer
driven cycles, operator driven cycles, and user-driven cycles. There's a
ton of value to each of these three legs of the tripod on which
OpenStack services stand. Nonetheless, in a core OpenStack service like
Glance, I strongly believe that we need to find the center of gravity of
this tripod in order to balance the development dance. In Newton, I plan
to start a broadcast communication channel for the use of all the three
legs namely developers, operators, and users. We already have the MLs
and IRC media of communication that fulfill the unicast and multicast
requirements. I find blogs to be more representatives of personal
opinions rather than a medium of project updates. I plan to interview
the active developers, interested operators & users on their work &
perspectives; publish the update transcripts publicly on non-textual
media for a hands-free consumption. The most important reason for this
proposed initiative being communication of intent and not just of the
information, and my observation is that lack of communication of intent
is an important reason for many livelocks in the OpenStack people
problem realm.

Official candidacy [2].

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/newton-glance-summit-planning
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/293253

Thank you for reading and for your consideration.

Nikhil Komawar