[openstack-dev] [designate] Status of the project

Hayes, Graham graham.hayes at hpe.com
Fri Feb 10 15:53:03 UTC 2017


On 10/02/17 02:40, Jay Pipes wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for reading - it ended up longer than expected.

> 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.

I remember the same things being discussed. However, that is not what
happened, at least not immediately, and it can be very hard to
motivate yourself to work on things when everytime you ask for help
you get nothing, other than a link to the docs page you have read
a 100 times.

> 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.

Yeah, writing docs is hard to do right, and honestly, we have been
trying to just keep up with bugs recently.

The problem for us is, where do things like operational docs go?
There is an ops guide, but it is very hard to see where we could
put content. I am also a firm believer that
docs.openstack.org/developer/<project> is *not* the place for
end user / ops / etc documentation - its why our docs are so
messy right now.

I have pinged a few people for docs, and am waiting for responses.

> Best,
> -jay
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________________________________________________
> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> 




More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list