Open Stack

On 02/09/2017 02:19 PM, Hayes, Graham wrote:
<snip>

> Where too now then?
> ===================
>
> Well, this is where I call out to people who actually use the project -
> don't
> jump ship and use something else because of the picture I have painted.
> We are
> a dedicated team, how cares about the project. We just need some help.
>
> I know there are large telcos who use Designate. I am sure there is tooling,
> or docs build up in these companies that could be very useful to the
> project.
>
> Nearly every commercial OpenStack distro has Designate. Some have had it
> since
> the beginning. Again, developers, docs, tooling, testers, anything and
> everything is welcome. We don't need a massive amount of resources - we
> are a
> small ish, stable, project.
>
> We need developers with upstream time allocated, and the budget to go to
> events
> like the PTG - for cross project work, and internal designate road map,
> these
> events form the core of how we work.
>
> We also need help from cross project teams - the work done by them is
> brilliant
> but it can be hard for smaller projects to consume. We have had a lot of
> progress since the `Leveller Playing Field`_ debate, but a lot of work is
> still optimised for the larger teams who get direct support, or well
> resourced
> teams who can dedicate people to the implementation of plugins / code.
>
> As someone I was talking to recently said - AWS is not winning public cloud
> because of commodity compute (that does help - a lot), but because of the
> added services that make using the cloud, well, cloud like. OpenStack
> needs to
> decide that either it is just compute, or if it wants the eco-system. [5]_
> Designate is far from alone in this.

<snip>

Graham, thank you for the heartfelt post. I may not agree with all your 
points, but I know you're coming from the right place and truly want to 
see Designate (and OpenStack in general) succeed.

Your point about smaller projects finding it more difficult to "consume" 
help from cross-project teams is an interesting one. When the big tent 
was being discussed, I remember the TC specifically discussing a change 
for cross-project team focus: moving from a "we do this work for you" 
role to a "we help you do this work for yourself" role. You're correct 
that the increase in OpenStack projects meant that the cross-project 
teams simply would not be able to continue to be a service to other 
teams. This was definitely predicted during the big tent discussions.

If I had one piece of advice to give Designate, it would be to 
prioritize getting documentation (both installation as well as dev-ref 
and operational docs) in good shape. I know writing docs sucks, but docs 
are a springboard for users and contributors alike and can have a 
multiplying effect that's difficult to overstate. Getting those install 
and developer docs started would enable the cross-project docs team to 
guide Designate contributors in enhancing and cleaning up the docs and 
putting some polish on 'em. Your idea above that maybe some users 
already wrote some docs is a good one. Maybe reach out personally to 
those telcos and see if they can dig something up that can be the basis 
for upstream docs.

Best,
-jay