Open Stack

On 10/02/17 15:48, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> 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.)

Yes - definitely. We try to be good about review cycles (with the amount
we get, it is not that difficult for us to be good about bug triage, and
review triage), but I agree - how we work does make things difficult
for user contributors to become key contributors to a project.

Even for people who want to contribute as a hobby, the time and level
of funding required is quite high.

Thanks,

Graham

> Doug
> 
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