Open Stack

Hi all!

I am announcing my candidacy for PTL for the Ironic team for the Pike release
cycle. In case you don't know me, I'm dtantsur on IRC. I started working on
Ironic around late spring or summer 2014, and I'm probably best known as a
founder of ironic-inspector sub-project. I work for Red Hat.

The Bare metal project has been moving with an incredible pace recently. We've
got very good at defining and following our priorities (thanks Jim!). As a PTL,
I will continue facilitating setting cycle goals. I would like to incorporate
even more input from operators and people actually using Ironic.

I would like to concentrate on driving the following efforts:

* CI and testing improvements.

   The number of our jobs keeps growing, but we still don't cover a lot of
   features that Ironic provides. We had some ideas the last cycle, but we
   haven't had a chance to implement all of these.

   Additionally, there is an OpenStack-wide effort to promote Tempest plugins
   to become a generic useful and convenient tool for testing OpenStack.
   It may require a mindset shift for the developers, extensive cross-team
   communications and certain technical decisions to be made. I would be happy
   to see more downstream teams adopting our Tempest plugins as a primary way
   to conduct testing of their bare metal cloud.

* Driver improvements and unification

   First of all, we need to finish the driver composition. It will involve
   deciding the fate of the classic drivers and 3rd party CI.

   I would also like us to think more about unification between drivers.
   Several non-core things very from driver to driver: UEFI support, RAID
   support and capabilities discovery immediately come to my mind as examples.

* Of specific features, I'd particularly want to help finishing the
   boot-from-volume work and deploy steps, with RAID and partitioning as two
   applications of it.

   The latter is not going to be an easy win. Opening opportunities for
   operators and/or users to override the actions taken on deploy may shift
   the focus of Ironic to where we don't want it to be. Both RAID and
   partitioning have to find their place in the Compute API for (most of) our
   users to be able to use them.

* As our bug triager for quite some time, I'd like us to start working on our
   bug backlog more consistently. This may involve setting up regular phone
   calls for bug triaging and quick spec reviews.

* But my primary goal will be not to get in a way of our wonderful team :)

-- Dmitry Tantsur