Open Stack

Thierry,

I am not a big fan of the separate gerrit teams we have instituted inside the Kolla project.  I always believed we should have one core reviewer team responsible for all deliverables to avoid not just the appearance but the reality that each team would fragment the overall community of people working on Kolla containers and deployment tools.  This is yet another reason I didn’t want to split the repositories into separate deliverables in the first place – since it further fragments the community working on Kolla deliverables.

When we made our original mission statement, I originally wanted it scoped around just Ansible and Docker.  Fortunately, the core review team at the time made it much more general and broad before we joined the big tent.  Our mission statement permits multiple different orchestration tools.

Kolla is not “themed”, at least to me.  Instead it is one community with slightly different interests (some people work on Ansible, some on Kubernetes, some on containers, some on all 3, etc).  If we break that into separate projects with separate PTLs, those projects may end up competing with each other (which isn’t happening now inside Kolla).  I think competition is a good thing.  In this case, I am of the opinion it is high time we end the competition on deployment tools related to containers and get everyone working together rather than apart.  That is, unless those folks want to “work apart” which of course is their prerogative.  I wouldn’t suggest merging teams today that are separate that don’t have a desire to merge.  That said, Kolla is very warm and open to new contributors so hopefully no more new duplicate effort solutions are started.

Siloing the deliverables into separate teams I believe would result in the competition I just mentioned, and further discord between the deployment tool projects in the big tent.  We need consolidation around people working together, not division.  Division around Kolla weakens Kolla specifically and doesn’t help out OpenStack all that much either.

The idea of branding or themes is not really relevant to me.  Instead this is all about the people producing and consuming Kolla.  I’d like these folks to work together as much as feasible.  Breaking a sub-community apart (in this case Kolla) into up to 4 different communities with 4 different PTLs sounds wrong to me.

I hope my position is clear ☺  If not, feel free to ask any follow-up questions.

Regards
-steve


-----Original Message-----
From: Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org>
Organization: OpenStack
Reply-To: "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 at 4:21 AM
To: "openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org" <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [tc][kolla] Adding new deliverables

    Michał Jastrzębski wrote:
    > I created CIVS poll with options we discussed. Every core member should
    > get link to poll voting, if that's not the case, please let me know.
    
    Just a quick sidenote to explain how the "big-tent" model of governance
    plays in here...
    
    In the previous project structure model, we had "programs". If you
    wanted to do networking stuff, you had to join the Networking program
    (neutron). If you worked on object storage, you had to join the Object
    Storage program (swift). The main issue with this model is that it
    prevented alternate approaches from emerging (as a program PTL could
    just refuse its emergence to continue to "own" that space). It also
    created weird situations where there would be multiple distinct groups
    of people in a program, but a single PTL to elect to represent them all.
    That created unnecessary political issues within programs and tension
    around PTL election.
    
    Part of the big-tent project structure reform was to abolish programs
    and organize our work around "teams", rather than "themes". Project
    teams should be strongly aligned with a single team of people that work
    together. That allowed some amount of competition to emerge (we still
    try to avoid "gratuitous duplication of effort"), but most importantly
    made sure groups of people could "own" their work without having to
    defer to an outside core team or PTL. So if you have a distinct team, it
    should be its own separate project team with its own PTL. There is no
    program or namespace anymore. As a bonus side-effect, it made sure teams
    would not indefinitely grow, and we all know that it's difficult to grow
    core teams (and trust) beyond a certain point.
    
    This is why we have multiple packaging project teams, each specialized
    in a given package orchestration mechanism, rather than have a single
    "Packaging" program with a single PTL and Ansible / Puppet / Chef
    fighting in elections to get their man at the helm. This is why the
    Storlets team, while deeply related to Swift and in very good
    collaboration terms with them, was set up as a separate project team.
    Different people, different team.
    
    The fact that you're having hard discussions in Kolla about "adding new
    deliverables" produced by distinct groups of people indicates that you
    may be using Kolla as an old-style "program" rather than as a single
    team. Why not set them up as separate project teams ? What am I missing
    here ?
    
    -- 
    Thierry Carrez (ttx)
    
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