Open Stack

Interesting, now I like this thread more. Back to the original question
"what does an OpenStack user look like?", I'd like to translate it as
"what does a cloud user look like?". Unless we want to limit "OpenStack"
as a software for VPS service. IMHO, the cloud user is developers, who
can use the services provided by the cloud platform to fully automate
their services/products. But unfortunately, we're still far away from
that, especially given Zaqar's adoption is still low :(


On 14/10/17 08:21, Zane Bitter wrote:
> Replying to myself here, to avoid singling anyone in particular out. I
> want to rephrase the question, because people are overwhelmingly
> either failing to understand or refusing to answer it in the way I
> intended it.
>
> Most of the candidates are essentially saying that the answer is
> 'everyone'.
>
> I'm glad that we have such a bunch of next-level geniuses running for
> the TC that they are able to analyse the needs of all 7 billion people
> and evaluate every decision they make against all of them in real
> time. Me, I'm just an ordinary guy who can only hold a few things in
> his head at once, so I just try to focus on those and collaborate with
> people who have different perspectives to make sure that a range of
> needs are covered. This is kind of the founding principle of the Open
> Source (note: not Free Software) movement, actually. None of us is as
> smart as all of us (present company excepted, apparently). So it's
> good, but somewhat surprising that y'all are still here, given that
> you would be guaranteed insta-billionaires if you went out and started
> a proprietary software company.
>
> All sarcasm aside though, 'everyone' is a BS non-answer. It's the
> politician's answer.
>
> Not only because engineering trade-offs are a real thing, and some use
> cases will *definitely* be excluded in order to better serve others,
> but because the average user doesn't exist. If you design for the
> 'average' user then you are designing for nobody, because nobody is
> the average user. We shouldn't be designing for 'everybody' (aka
> nobody in particular), but for a large variety of somebodies.
>
> As an example, look at the Keystone discussion that I linked below.
> - If you were designing Keystone for an individual user, you'd might
> just have one account per tenant.
> - If you were designing Keystone for a team deploying semi-autonomous
> apps, you might design a way for multiple agents to authenticate to
> each tenant.
> - If you were designing Keystone for 'everyone', you might have a
> matrix of users, tenants and roles - the most generic solution, right?
> - and spend half a decade polishing it without ever realising that
> individual users don't need it and teams can't use it.
>
> One of these solutions works for both individuals and teams. The other
> two only work for individuals. As an added bonus, one of those is also
> expensive to develop and hard to operate. That's why we should design
> for someones, not for 'everyone'. This is not a problem limited to
> Keystone - throughout OpenStack we often fail to develop solutions
> that can actually be used by the people whom we say we're building
> them for, IMHO.
>
> I'm not asking y'all to say that some group of end-users is
> unimportant even though the question is trying to keep the bar
> extremely low by asking about only one group. Nor am I asking y'all to
> say that operators are unimportant, even though the question is
> *explicitly* *NOT* about operators.
>
> I'm asking if you can describe, to a modest level of detail, even one
> *end* user persona for OpenStack that you're familiar enough with to
> be comfortable advocating for on the TC.
>
> So far the answer I'm hearing mostly translates as 'no'. (Props to the
> folks who did actually answer though!) Does anybody want to try again?
>
> cheers,
> Zane.
>
> On 12/10/17 12:51, Zane Bitter wrote:
>> In my head, I have a mental picture of who I'm building OpenStack
>> for. When I'm making design decisions I try to think about how it
>> will affect these hypothetical near-future users. By 'users' here I
>> mean end-users, the actual consumers of OpenStack APIs. What will it
>> enable them to do? What will they have to work around? I think we
>> probably all do this, at least subconsciously. (Free tip: try doing
>> it consciously.)
>>
>> So my question to the TC candidates (and incumbent TC members, or
>> anyone else, if they want to answer) is: what does the hypothetical
>> OpenStack user that is top-of-mind in your head look like? Who are
>> _you_ building OpenStack for?
>>
>> There's a description of mine in this email, as an example:
>> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-October/123312.html
>>
>>
>> To be clear, for me at least there's only one wrong answer ("person
>> who needs somewhere to run their IRC bouncer"). What's important in
>> my opinion is that we have a bunch of people with *different* answers
>> on the TC, because I think that will lead to better discussion and
>> hopefully better decisions.
>>
>> Discuss.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Zane.
>
>
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Cheers & Best regards,
Feilong Wang (王飞龙)
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Tel: +64-48032246
Email: flwang at catalyst.net.nz
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