[openstack-dev] [tc] [all] OpenStack moving both too fast and too slow at the same time

Chris Dent cdent+os at anticdent.org
Thu May 4 11:32:18 UTC 2017


On Wed, 3 May 2017, Drew Fisher wrote:

> This email is meant to be the ML discussion of a question I brought up
> during the TC meeting on April 25th.; [1]

Thanks for starting this Drew, I hope my mentioning it in my tc
report email wasn't too much of a nag.

I've added [tc] and [all] tags to the subject in case people are
filtering. More within.

> The TL;DR version is:
>
> Reading the user survey [2], I see the same issues time and time again.
> Pages 18-19 of the survey are especially common points.
> Things move too fast, no LTS release, upgrades are terrifying for
> anything that isn't N-1 -> N.
> These come up time and time again
> How is the TC working with the dev teams to address these critical issues?

As I recall the "OpenStack-wide Goals"[a] are supposed to help address
some of this sort of thing but it of course relies on people first
proposing and detailing goals and then there actually being people
to act on them. The first part was happening at[b] but it's not
clear if that's the current way.

Having people is the hard part. Given the current contribution
model[c] that pretty much means enterprises ponying up the people do
the work. If they don't do that then the work won't get done, and
people won't buy the products they are supporting, I guess? Seems a
sad state of affairs.

There's also an issue where we seem to have decided that it is only
appropriate to demand a very small number of goals per cycle
(because each project already has too much on their plate, or too big
a backlog, relative to resources). It might be that as the
_Technical_ Committe is could be legitimate to make a larger demand.
(Or it could be completely crazy.)

> I asked this because on page 18 is this comment:
>
> "Most large customers move slowly and thus are running older versions,
> which are EOL upstream sometimes before they even deploy them."

Can someone with more of the history give more detail on where the
expectation arose that upstream ought to be responsible things like
long term support? I had always understood that such features were
part of the way in which the corporately avaialable products added
value?

> This is exactly what we're seeing with some of our customers and I
> wanted to ask the TC about it.

I know you're not speaking as the voice of your employer when making
this message, so this is not directed at you, but from what I can
tell Oracle's presense upstream (both reviews and commits) in Ocata
and thus far in Pike has not been huge. Maybe that's something that
needs to change to keep the customers happy? Or at all.

[a]: https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/index.html
[b]: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/community-goals
[c]: There's talk that the current model will change from devs hired
to do OpenStack development being the main engine of contribution to
users of OpenStack, who happen to be devs, being the main engine. Do
we know the slope on that trend?

> Thanks,
>
> -Drew
>
> [1]
> http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2017/tc.2017-04-25-20.00.log.html#l-177
> [2] https://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April2017SurveyReport.pdf

-- 
Chris Dent                  ┬──┬◡ノ(° -°ノ)       https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent


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