Open Stack

Excerpts from Jay Pipes's message of 2017-02-09 21:33:03 -0500:
> 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
> 

Thank you for bringing this into the open, Graham.

I think we have several projects that would benefit by transitioning
from relying solely on vendor contributions to building up the
deployer/user contributor base. That's a relatively new approach
for some parts of the OpenStack community, but it's common elsewhere
in open source projects. The shift is likely to mean some changes
in the way we organize ourselves, because it may not be reasonable
to assume user-contributors have large amounts of time to focus on
long review cycles, traveling to sprints, or the other intensive
activities that are part of our current routine. (That's not to say
the Designate team has introduced any of those issues, of course.
We need to be thinking about removing obstacles for contributors
across the entire community.)

Doug